by Annie Murray
He closed his eyes as the truck jolted them towards the waiting lines of aircraft. Now it was all before him, the long, dark hell of never knowing when you might be blown out of the sky. He had to take a piece of heaven with him, and she was that heaven. I love you, Sylvia, he said in his mind, over and over. My dear, dear love. Please, dear God, spare me – let me see her again.
The engines of the heavy bomber aircraft roared into the night. As the crew all settled into their positions, Laurie checked and triple-checked his navigation equipment. Over the engine noise he could hear Ron speaking into the wireless. Laurie thought of their rear gunner, Fred Howes, with whom he had shaken hands only minutes ago, at his post in the lonely gun turret behind them. Joe Riley, the bomb aimer, was in his position. Out of sight, Wallace Paine, pilot for this trip, and second pilot Angus MacPherson were in the cockpit. All of them, for that night, were obliged to trust each other more than any other people on earth.
They began to taxi, and the roar of the engines filled Laurie’s head. He breathed deeply from his oxygen mask, determined that nerves would not get the better of him. After that, it was a relief to be absorbed in the tasks before him during their lurching progress towards the runway. He checked and rechecked his navigation charts. The accurate plotting of the journey was his responsibility. It made him feel both afraid and electrically alive and alert.
As the aircraft lifted into the darkening sky, he thought of the massive assembly of planes combining around them for this enterprise. Wave after wave of heavy bombers were leaving airfields all over the eastern region. Their own bombers were to be among the early groups of planes to reach Cologne, carrying ordnance that was mostly incendiaries. Behind them were more waves of bombers carrying heavy explosives. Home was below them now, their distance from it increasing with every second. They were in this strange, abstract country called air space, where all their houses and streets, beloved villages and fields were laid out in miniature like a model, invisible now in the gloom. He thought of Birmingham, of turning the plane towards his home city and flying over it, knowing that she – the woman he loved – was there below him. And then he allowed himself no thought other than his work of navigating the plane. There were key points he had to head towards: the Dutch coast, the mission over Cologne, followed by a swift south-westerly turn towards Euskirchen, then west again and home.
An intense silence had overcome the crew and there was only the engine throb and the rushing force of the wind against the aircraft. The next time a voice was heard, it was Laurie’s own, speaking through the intercom to the pilot: ‘Enemy coast ahead.’ No more black sea below. They were flying over land, heading towards Ouddorp, in Holland.
Forty-Eight
As soon as she got home from work that terrible afternoon Sylvia knew something was wrong. The house felt unnaturally quiet. A terrible thought came to her: the baby! Was he all right? She hung her cap up, telling herself not to be so ridiculous, and was about to run upstairs to see him and Audrey when her mother appeared in the doorway of the front room.
‘Oh,’ Sylvia said. ‘You made me jump.’ Behind Mom was Marjorie Gould. Someone else was sitting in the room. She could see legs: Audrey’s. Where was the baby? The look on Mom’s and Marjorie’s faces turned her stomach to lead.
‘Come and sit down, Sylvia,’ Mom said. Her voice was tight and restrained, but Marjorie put her hands over her face and began to moan.
‘Oh, God!’ Sylvia said. Her legs almost gave way before she reached a chair. Audrey immediately leaned over and reached out, gripping her arm.
‘No . . .’ Words fell from Sylvia’s lips. ‘No . . . no!’ She had no clear thought, just an appalling dread. She looked round at all of them. Of the three, Audrey looked the most in command of herself, so it couldn’t be the baby.
‘It’s all right, sis,’ Audrey said in a desperate voice. ‘We’re all here.’
Marjorie Gould was sobbing, still standing halfway across the room.
‘No!’ Sylvia cried again. ‘Don’t tell me! Not . . .’ But she couldn’t say Laurie’s name.
‘Give it to her, Mom,’ Audrey breathed.
Pauline’s hands were trembling so much she could hardly pass her the sheet of telegraph paper. ‘Oh, I don’t want –’ she said. ‘Oh, if I could only—’
Sylvia read out:
MRS S. GOULD REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON LAURIE GOULD IS MISSING AS THE RESULT OF AIR OPERATION NIGHT OF 30/31 MAY 42 STOP LETTER FOLLOWS STOP ANY FURTHER INFORMATION BE IMMEDIATELY COMMUNICATED TO YOU.
‘Missing!’ She looked up desperately at Marjorie. ‘That means they don’t know?’ She could feel her eyes stretching wide, like a little child trying to take in a new and dreadful sight.
‘Sis, come and sit down . . .’ Audrey’s tired face was full of such tender sympathy that Sylvia knew immediately they did not hold out any hope.
‘I feel ever so queer,’ Sylvia said. There were lights at the edge of her vision.
‘She’s fainting, Mom!’ she heard Audrey say. She felt her sister’s arm round her, and her mother telling her to put her head between her knees. As the blood pumped to her dizzy head, she heard Marjorie’s agonized cries.
‘My boys, my lovely boys,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, why did I have boys, for them to go like this? It’s wicked, wicked – oh, my beloved little babies . . .’
Gradually Sylvia’s consciousness came back to the room. She couldn’t stop her teeth chattering. She felt clammy and sick. Audrey was gripping her hand and Mom, holding Marjorie in her arms, was looking back at her, torn by the need to comfort both of them at once. Marjorie was emitting wrenching sobs.
‘Something can’t have happened to him.’ Sylvia looked up at Audrey, who was sitting on the arm of her chair. ‘I love him and he loves me. We’re going to get married!’
‘Oh, Sylv . . .’ Audrey put her arm round Sylvia’s shoulders and held her tightly. ‘Oh my poor, poor sis.’
‘I knew it,’ Sylvia’s voice was very small, without force. ‘I was so happy. I knew it couldn’t really be true. Oh,’ she looked across the room at the awful distress of Laurie’s mother, ‘Oh my God, poor, poor Marjorie.’
A letter arrived the next day. Once again Marjorie brought it round to them. They all knew that Stanley Gould, while cut to the core by the loss of his sons, could not speak of the things he felt and would not be any help to Marjorie. They would have to provide whatever comfort they could. It was awful to see her: in twenty-four hours she had shrunk and withered. She walked bent forward, as if her body was wrapped around her pain, and the flesh on her face sagged with grief. Her once-bright hair looked faded and lifeless.
The letter was from Laurie’s wing commander. Sylvia read it out:
Dear Mr and Mrs Gould,
It is with the greatest regret that I have to write confirming the news given in my telegram of earlier today that your son, First Class Aircraftman Laurie Gould, has been reported missing from an operational sortie against Cologne on the night of 30/31st May 1942.
The aircraft in which your son was navigator took off at 20.41 hrs on 30th May, since when nothing further has been heard. There is of course a possibility that the crew have landed safely, but it is still too early to expect news of such an eventuality. Should I hear anything, I will communicate with you immediately.
It was the next paragraph of the letter that made her weep:
Your son’s personal effects are being collected together and will be forwarded to the Standing Committee of Adjustment, Colnbrook, Slough, for onward transmission to you in due course.
May I, on behalf of myself and the Squadron as a whole, extend to you our sincere sympathy and understanding at this anxious time.
As soon as Sylvia read the first line, the thin thread of hope against the odds – which had kept her breathing, moving, going through the motions of life for the past day – was stretched almost to breaking point. But she could not let it snap, not yet. Not while there was any chance . . .
She handed the letter back to Marjorie in silence, tears running down her cheeks. They could not look each other in the eye, not then. Each of them was too weighed down by her own grief to be able to take on the other’s.
‘How’s Stanley?’ Pauline asked gently.
‘Oh, well, you know Stanley,’ Marjorie said, thrusting the letter into her pocket. She was not tearful today. She seemed brittle and angry. Her eyes – so like Laurie’s – kept moving round the room as if unable to settle. ‘I don’t know what to do with myself,’ she burst out at last. ‘Stanley’s as silent as the grave, and Paul – well, what does Paul understand? I don’t know. Raymond’s not coming back. Now Laurie’s not coming back, and Paul keeps asking for them. Oh!’ She gave a sound of pent-up rage and tore at her hair. ‘Two sons. Two sons I’ve given up for all this, this rotten, hellish war. And for what? Is it over? Has anything been saved by it, or the world made a better place for my two boys dying? No – it damn well hasn’t.
‘I used to look down on those men who were conchees, but my God, if I had my time again, I’d stop my lads joining up and throwing their lives away.’ With her hands still pushed into her hair, she closed her eyes and for a moment Sylvia thought she was going to faint. But she had just run out of words. More quietly, lowering her arms, she said, ‘For what? That stinking Kraut, Hitler, is still winning. Women’s sons are dying – sons from everywhere.’ She looked at them, bewildered. ‘None of it makes any sense. I feel as if . . .’ Her voice broke then, lowered to a whisper. ‘Everything I’ve lived for has been taken away.’
Audrey appeared downstairs then, with the baby in a shawl in her arms. She looked at her mother, who shook her head faintly. This did not feel like the right moment to offer Marjorie the little lad to hold.
‘I must get back to Paul,’ Marjorie said. Even though there were no tears, she wiped her face with the backs of her large hands. ‘At least I’ve got one son who they won’t throw away as cannon-fodder.’
‘Marjorie,’ Pauline touched her arm as she passed, ‘I’ll be round – a bit later.’
‘There’s nothing to do, is there?’ Marjorie said hopelessly. ‘What can we do?’ She stopped, looking down at the sleeping baby in passing. ‘Just make sure,’ she said to Audrey, ‘that you don’t ever send him off to war. You keep him by you, love. If every mother does that, the world’ll be a better place.’
It was the last time they saw her in good health and on her feet for a very long time. The next day Stanley came round and told Pauline that Marjorie had taken to her bed. There was nothing he could do to persuade her to get up.
Forty-Nine
Sylvia insisted on going to the yard to work every day. All she could think of was keeping so busy that she would not have time to think. She could not bear the thought of sitting still, even though Bill Jones kindly said that she could probably ask for a couple of days off.
‘Compassionate leave, like,’ he said. ‘It’d be all right, love.’
Sylvia gave a wan smile. ‘Thanks, Mr Jones, but I’m better keeping busy. Sitting around with too much time to think is the worst thing.’
‘Well, I’m sure you’re right,’ Bill said. ‘But if you change your mind, I’d put in a word for you.’
The others girls were sweet and sympathetic. Madge was the softest Sylvia had ever seen her. ‘Oh my God, Sylv,’ she said. ‘That’s the worst. You poor, poor thing.’ Sylvia was touched by this, and by how upset the others were.
‘Oh, Sylv,’ Elsie said, ‘your lovely Laurie.’ All the girls had fallen for Laurie when he came into the yard. ‘I’m ever so sorry. It seems pointless trying to say anything.’
‘No, it’s okay. Thanks,’ Sylvia looked round, dry-eyed, at her friends, Elsie, Gina and the others. ‘I suppose I can’t really take it in, not yet.’ Even the letter from the wing commander had not fully made it sink in. She was going through life in a numb state, as if she was not really there, as if she had slipped into a dream. Her father had come home the day they received the news and had silently taken her in his arms, something he would never normally do. The thought of that – of her cheek pressed against Dad’s shirt button and his bony ribcage, of his comforting smell and the look in his eyes – could most make her weep when she thought about it. So she tried not to, except at night when she was alone in her room.
Whatever the RAF said or what other people thought, she could not believe that Laurie was dead. She didn’t say this to anyone, because she didn’t want to see their pitying looks. But Laurie not coming back was just impossible. Laurie was part of life. He had always been there, full of beans, his lovely fresh face grinning at her, running across the yard to her at Hockley to take her in his arms. One day he would come back and do that again – she just could not let herself believe that it was over and he was gone. It was too unbearable. Every night she lay and sobbed herself into an exhausted sleep.
‘You know, Sylv,’ Elsie said hesitantly one day, ‘even before all this we said we ought to get out more, do a few things together – especially now the summer’s coming. Maybe we should meet up, go to the flicks or summat. I don’t s’pose you feel like it now,’ she was gabbling, afraid she had been tactless. ‘But sometime maybe, when you’re ready?’
‘Thanks, Else,’ Sylvia said, busying herself with sorting out her things in the mess room. She had hardly even heard what Elsie said. ‘That’s nice of you. Now, we’d best get out there and get weaving, hadn’t we?’
Audrey’s baby was one of the few things Sylvia found comforting. He was so tiny and fragile, he had no idea what was going on and could not try and say kind, well-meaning things. She could just hold him and rock him, soothing herself in the process.
Pauline was trying to divide herself between comforting Marjorie and Sylvia, both of whom were left with this agony at losing the same beloved boy. Laurie was so like his mother that now, instead of sweetly reminding Sylvia of her absent love, the sight of Marjorie represented all that she had lost. But she did not run into Marjorie, because she had taken to her bed. Paul spent a lot of time at the Whitehouses’ now, with Pauline looking after him.
‘Is Mrs Gould ill, Mom?’ Audrey asked as Pauline came back from visiting one afternoon, a few days after they received the news.
‘She looks poorly,’ Pauline said, sinking wearily onto a chair in the kitchen. She rested her chin on her hands at the table. ‘She says she just hasn’t the will to get up. I s’pose she just needs to come to terms with it, but I’ve never seen her bad like this before.’
It made things feel even more desolate, without Marjorie coming in and out. Sylvia could hardly bear to think of her lying alone in her bedroom, grieving silently all day long. She wondered if she should go and see her, but she didn’t have the strength.
Audrey was the person Sylvia felt closest to, in a way they had never been close before. Although Audrey’s own problems had been rather pushed aside by the news that Laurie was missing, Sylvia knew that she was suffering as well.
In all that was happening, they had forgotten to keep pressing Audrey as to what she was going to call her son. But on one of those early summer evenings, Sylvia and Audrey were out in the garden while Jack was seeing to the animals. Audrey squatted down on the blue brick path, holding the little boy in front of her to watch LaVerne, Maxene, Patty and the remaining ‘royal ladies’ being chased into the coop for the night. Sylvia gave a wan smile.
‘He’s taking it all in – he is!’ she said. ‘Look, his eyes have gone wider, as if he’s surprised.’
Audrey laughed. ‘He does look a bit startled,’ she said, standing up and cradling him again. Jack dashed past, trying to catch two of the rabbits that had been enjoying the spring dandelions by the air-raid shelter.
‘It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?’ Audrey said. ‘I never asked for him or wanted him. I don’t know how on earth I’m going to get by, really. But I can’t seem to help wanting him, now he’s here. We sort of came through it together.’
‘It’s natural, I
suppose,’ Sylvia said, the ache that was always present inside her sharpening into a stab of desolation. Would she ever have the chance for a husband and child herself now? She struggled to rally herself. There was still hope. He would come back. He would. And she didn’t want to sink into feeling sorry for herself. Raymond and countless others had lost their lives, and here she was, still breathing, still standing in the sun. She must not be so ungrateful as to despair, although at times it was so hard not to. It was missing him that was the worst. It was not knowing whether now Laurie was ever going to walk into a room and smile at her again, or turn up at the yard and call her name . . . The longer it went on without any word from him, the harder it became to cling to hope.
‘D’you know who called round today?’ Audrey said. ‘I forgot to tell you. That bloke who took us to Selly Oak Hospital.’
‘What, the ambulance man?’
‘That’s the one. Colin something.’
‘What on earth did he come round for?’ Sylvia asked.
‘Just to find out if I was all right. And to see this one, I think.’ She nodded down at the baby.
‘Well, that was nice. I don’t think they normally do that.’
‘No,’ Audrey said. ‘That’s what I thought. Nice feller, though.’ There was something in her sister’s voice that made Sylvia look round, but all Audrey said was, ‘Kind of him. They must wonder, sometimes, what’s happened to people. In fact he asked if he could come again.’
‘Oh did he?’ Was that a blush on Audrey’s cheeks?
‘Anyway, I’ve decided what to call this one. In fact I’ve had him baptized.’
‘What? How d’you mean?’ Audrey was dropping one surprise after another. ‘What about Mom, and christening robes, and everything?’