War

by Roald Dahl

  The operator sounded like a lovely elderly lady. I told her how I had been abroad for three years and was trying to find my mother. ‘She’ll have moved,’ the operator said. ‘She’ll probably have been bombed out like all the rest of them and she’s had to move somewhere else.’ She was too kind to add that the whole family might well have been killed in the bombing, but I knew what she was thinking and she probably guessed that I was thinking it, too.

  I waited in the pitch-dark telephone kiosk down in the docks of Liverpool, pressing the receiver hard to my ear and wondering what I was going to say to my mother if I was lucky enough to get through. After a while the operator came back on the line and said, ‘I have found one Mrs Dahl. She’s a Mrs S. Dahl and she’s at a place called Grendon Underwood. Could that be the one?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I don’t think that could be her. But thank you so much for trying.’ What I should have said was, ‘Try it, we might be lucky,’ because that, as it turned out, was my mother’s new home. A bomb had landed in their house in Kent while my mother and two of my sisters and their four dogs were sensibly sheltering in the cellar. They had scrambled out the next morning and having seen their house in ruins had simply got into the small family Hillman Minx, the three of them and the four dogs, and had driven through London north into the Buckinghamshire countryside. Then they had cruised slowly through the small villages looking for a house that had a For Sale notice by the front gate. In the tiny rural village of Grendon Underwood, ten miles north of Aylesbury, they found a small white cottage with a thatched roof and it had the notice-board they were looking for stuck in the hedge. My mother had no money with which to buy it, but one of the sisters had some savings and she bought the place on the spot and they all moved in. I knew none of this on that dark wet evening in Liverpool docks.

  I went back to the ship and collected my kit-bag and my two sacks of lemons and limes and tinned marmalade, and I staggered to the station with this load on my back and found a train for London. I sat all of the next morning by the window of the train gazing in wonder at the green, rain-sodden fields of England. I had forgotten what they looked like. After the dusty plains of East Africa and the sandy deserts of Egypt they looked ridiculously and unnaturally green.

  My train did not reach London until nightfall. At Euston Station I shouldered my belongings and trudged through the blacked-out bomb-shattered streets, heading for the West End. When I got to Leicester Square, I somehow managed to find in the darkness a small seedy hotel. I went in and asked the manageress if I could use the telephone. An RAF uniform with wings on the jacket was a great passport to have in England in 1941. The Battle of Britain had been won by the fighters and now the bombers were beginning seriously to attack Germany. The manageress looked at my wings and said that of course I could use her telephone.

  With the London telephone directory in my hands, I had a bright idea. I looked up the name of my ancient half-sister who I knew was married to a biochemist called Professor A. A. Miles (the Goat’s Tobacco man in Boy). They lived in London. I found their number and rang it. The ancient half-sister answered the phone and I told her it was me. When the squeals of surprise had died down, I asked her where my mother and my other sisters were. They were in Buckinghamshire, she told me. She would telephone my mother at once to give her the amazing news.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Just give me the number. I’ll call her myself.’

  The half-sister gave me the number and I wrote it down. She also told me she could give me a bed for the night and I wrote down her address in Hampstead. ‘Try to get a taxi,’ she said. ‘If you don’t have any money, we can pay for it when you arrive.’ I said I would do that.

  Then I rang my mother.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Is that you, mama?’

  She knew my voice at once. There was a brief silence on the line as she struggled to get control of her emotions. I had been away for three years and we had not spoken in that time. In those days you did not telephone to one another from far-away countries as you do today. And three years is a long time to wait for the return of an only son who is flying fighters in places like the Western Desert and Greece. Eight months ago she had seen the village postman standing at the door of the cottage holding a buff-coloured telegram envelope in his hand. Every wife and every mother in the country lived in dread of opening the front door to a postman with a telegram. Many of them refused even to slit the envelope. They could not bear to read the terse War Office message: We regret to inform you of the death of your husband [or son] killed in action etc. etc. They would leave the telegram on the dresser until someone else came along to open it for them. My mother had put her telegram aside and had waited for one of her daughters to return from her daily stint of driving a lorry. Then they had both sat down on the sofa and my sister had opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside. REGRET TO ADVISE YOU, the message read, YOUR SON WOUNDED AND IN HOSPITAL IN ALEXANDRIA. The relief was unbearable.

  ‘I’d like a drink,’ my mother had said.

  The sister had got out the precious, impossible-to-buy bottle from the cupboard and they had both had a good stiff slug of neat gin there and then.

  ‘Is that really you, Roald?’ my mother’s voice was saying now very softly on the telephone.

  ‘I’m back,’ I said.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  There was another pause, and I heard her whispering urgently to one of the sisters who must have been standing beside her.

  ‘When will we see you?’ she asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘As soon as I can get a train. I’ve got some lemons for you, and some limes, and some big tins of marmalade.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Try to get an early train.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a train as early as I can.’

  I thanked the manageress who had been listening from behind her little desk in the hotel lobby, and I went out to try and find a taxi. I was standing just inside the porch of the hotel in Leicester Square in the pitch darkness of the black-out when a group of four or five soldiers peered into the porch. ‘It’s a bloody officer!’ one shouted. ‘Let’s ’ave ’im!’

  The leering slightly drunken faces closed in on me and the fists were coming when one of them called out suddenly, ‘Hey stop! ’Ee’s RAF! ’Ee’s a pilot! ’Ee’s got ruddy wings on ’im!’ They backed away and disappeared into the darkness.

  It shook me a bit to realize that this was a posse of drunken soldiers prowling around the black streets of London searching for an officer to beat up.

  No taxi came, so I slung my enormously heavy kit-bags over my shoulders and set out to walk to Hampstead. From Leicester Square that is a long walk even without three kit-bags to carry, but I was young and strong and I was on my way home and I felt I could have walked a hundred miles had it been necessary.

  It took me an hour and three-quarters to reach the ancient half-sister’s house, and there was a happy meeting and I gave presents of lemons and limes and marmalade and then fell gratefully into bed.

  Early the next morning, I was driven to Marylebone Station and found a train for Aylesbury. The journey took an hour and fifteen minutes. At Aylesbury I found a bus which, so the driver assured me, would go right through the village of Grendon Underwood. The bus took longer than the train, and all the way I kept asking an old man who sat beside me to be sure to tell me when we were approaching Grendon Underwood.

  ‘We’re coming into it now,’ he said at last. ‘It’s not much of a place. Just a few cottages and a pub.’

  I caught sight of my mother when the bus was still a hundred yards away. She was standing patiently outside the gate of the cottage waiting for the bus to come along, and for all I knew she had been standing there when the earlier bus had gone by an hour or two before. But what is one hour or even three hours when you have been waiting three years?

  I signalled the bus-driver and he stopped
the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.

  ONLY THIS

  * * *

  First published in Ladies’ Home Journal (September 1944)

  That night the frost was very heavy. It covered the hedges and whitened the grass in the fields so that it seemed almost as though it had been snowing. But the night was clear and beautiful and bright with stars, and the moon was nearly full.

  The cottage stood alone in a corner of the big field. There was a path from the front door which led across the field to a stile and on over the next field to a gate which opened on to the lane about three miles from the village. There were no other houses in sight and the country around was open and flat and many of the fields were under the plough because of the war.

  The light of the moon shone upon the cottage. It shone through the open window into the bedroom where the woman was asleep. She slept lying on her back, with her face upturned to the ceiling, with her long hair spread out around her on the pillow, and although she was asleep, her face was not the face of someone who is resting. Once she had been beautiful, but now there were thin furrows running across her forehead and there was a tightness about the way in which her skin was stretched over the cheekbones. But her mouth was still gentle, and as she slept, she did not close her lips.

  The bedroom was small, with a low ceiling, and for furniture there was a dressing-table and an armchair. The clothes of the woman lay over the back of the armchair where she had put them when she undressed. Her black shoes were on the floor beside the chair. On the dressing-table there was a hairbrush, a letter and a large photograph of a young boy in uniform who wore a pair of wings on the left side of his tunic. It was a smiling photograph, the kind that one likes to send to one’s mother, and it had a thin, black frame made of wood. The moon shone through the open window and the woman slept her restless sleep. There was no noise anywhere save for the soft, regular noise of her breathing and the rustle of the bedclothes as she stirred in her sleep.

  Then, from far away, there came a deep, gentle rumble which grew and grew and became louder and louder until soon the whole sky seemed to be filled with a great noise which throbbed and throbbed and kept on throbbing and did not stop.

  Right at the beginning, even before it came close, the woman had heard the noise. In her sleep she had been waiting for it, listening for the noise and dreading the moment when it would come. When she heard it, she opened her eyes and for a while she lay quite still, listening. Then she sat up, pushed the bedclothes aside and got out of bed. She went over to the window and placing her hands on the window sill, she leaned out, looking up into the sky; and her long hair fell down over her shoulders, over the thin cotton nightdress which she wore. For many minutes she stood there in the cold, leaning out of the window, hearing the noise, looking up and searching the sky; but she saw only the bright moon and the stars.

  ‘God keep you,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh dear God keep you safe.’

  Then she turned and went quickly over to the bed, pulled the blankets away and wrapped them round her shoulders like a shawl. She slipped her bare feet into the black shoes and walked over to the armchair and pushed it forward so that it was right up in front of the window. Then she sat down.

  The noise and the throbbing overhead was very great. For a long time it continued as the huge procession of bombers moved towards the south. All the while the woman sat huddled in her blankets, looking out of the window into the sky.

  Then it was over. Once more the night became silent. The frost lay heavy on the field and on the hedges and it seemed as though the whole countryside was holding its breath. An army was marching in the sky. All along the route people had heard the noise and knew what it was; they knew that soon, even before they had gone to sleep, there would be a battle. Men drinking beer in the pubs had stopped their talking in order to listen. Families in their houses had turned off the radio and gone out into their gardens, where they stood looking up into the sky. Soldiers arguing in their tents had stopped their shouting, and men and women walking home at night from the factories had stood still on the road, listening to the noise.

  It is always the same. As the bombers move south across the country at night, the people who hear them become strangely silent. For those women whose men are with the planes, the moment is not an easy one to bear.

  Now they had gone, and the woman lay back in the armchair and closed her eyes, but she did not sleep. Her face was white and the skin seemed to have been drawn tightly over her cheeks and gathered up in wrinkles around her eyes. Her lips were parted and it was as though she were listening to someone talking. Almost she could hear the sound of his voice as he used to call to her from outside the window when he came back from working in the fields. She could hear him saying he was hungry and asking what there was for supper, and then when he came in he would put his arm around her shoulder and talk to her about what he had been doing all day. She would bring in the supper and he would sit down and start to eat and always he would say, Why don’t you have some, and she never knew what to answer except that she wasn’t hungry. She would sit and watch him and pour out his tea, and after a while she would take his plate and go out into the kitchen to get him some more.

  It was not easy having only one child. The emptiness when he was not there and the knowing all the time that something might happen; the deep conscious knowing that there was nothing else to live for except this; that if something did happen, then you too would be dead. There would be no use in sweeping the floor or washing the dishes or cleaning the house; there would be no use in gathering wood for the fire or in feeding the hens; there would be no use in living.

  Now, as she sat there by the open window she did not feel the cold; she felt only a great loneliness and a great fear. The fear took hold of her and grew upon her so that she could not bear it, and she got up from the chair and leaned out of the window again, looking up into the sky. And as she looked the night was no longer beautiful; it was cold and clear and immensely dangerous. She did not see the fields or the hedges or the carpet of frost upon the countryside; she saw only the depths of the sky and the danger that was there.

  Slowly she turned and sank down again into her chair. Now the fear was great. She could think of nothing at all except that she must see him and be with him, that she must see him now because tomorrow would be too late. She let her head rest against the back of the chair and when she closed her eyes she saw the aircraft; she saw it clearly in the moonlight, moving forward through the night like a great, black bird. She was close to it and she could see the way in which the nose of the machine reached out far ahead of everything, as though the bird was craning its neck in the eagerness of its passage. She could see the markings on the wings and on the body and she knew that he was inside. Twice she called to him, but there was no answer; then the fear and the longing welled up within her so that she could stand it no longer and it carried her forward through the night and on and on until she was with him, beside him, so close that she could have touched him had she put out her hand.

  He was sitting at the controls with gloves on his hands, dressed in a great bulky flying suit which made his body look huge and shapeless and twice its normal size. He was looking straight ahead at the instruments on the panel, concentrating upon what he was doing and thinking of nothing except flying the machine.

  Now she called to him again and he heard her. He looked around and when he saw her, he smiled and stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder, and then all the fear and the loneliness and the longing went out of her and she was happy.

  For a long time she stood beside him watching him as he flew the machine. Every now and then he would look around and smile at her, and once he said something, but she could not hear what it was because of the noise of the engines. Suddenly he pointed ahead through the glass windshield of the aeroplane and she saw that the sky was full of searchlights. There were many hundreds of them; long
white fingers of light travelling lazily across the sky, swaying this way and that, working in unison so that sometimes several of them would come together and meet in the same spot and after a while they would separate and meet again somewhere else, all the time searching the night for the bombers which were moving in on the target.

  Behind the searchlights she saw the flak. It was coming up from the town in a thick many-coloured curtain, and the flash of the shells as they burst in the sky lit up the inside of the bomber.

  He was looking straight ahead now, concentrating upon the flying, weaving through the searchlights and going directly into this curtain of flak, and she watched and waited and did not dare to move or to speak lest she distract him from his task.

  She knew that they had been hit when she saw the flames from the nearest engine on the left side. She watched them through the glass of the side panel, licking against the surface of the wing as the wind blew them backwards, and she watched them take hold of the wing and come dancing over the black surface until they were right up under the cockpit itself. At first she was not frightened. She could see him sitting there, very cool, glancing continually to one side, watching the flames and flying the machine, and once he looked quickly around and smiled at her and she knew then that there was no danger. All around she saw the searchlights and the flak and the explosions of the flak and the colours of the tracer, and the sky was not a sky but just a small confined space which was so full of lights and explosions that it did not seem possible that one could fly through it.

  But the flames were brighter now on the left wing. They had spread over the whole surface. They were alive and active, feeding on the fabric, leaning backwards in the wind which fanned them and encouraged them and gave them no chance of going out.