Keep the Home Fires Burning

by S Block

  Teresa nodded.

  ‘I know . . .’

  He crossed over to her and crouched before her, taking her hands in his and looking deep into her eyes.

  ‘Don’t think about it.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Ever since you saw the pilot being lifted from the Spitfire you think about what happens to them, and there’s no point to it except to hope that it was over quickly. Beyond that you’ll simply drive yourself mad trying to mourn every pilot, soldier, sailor, man, woman and child killed by war, because the whole thing is an act of collective insanity.’

  For as long as she had known him, Teresa had always marvelled at how clearly Nick viewed war, without a shred of jingoism, without losing a drop of determination to do whatever was needed to protect his country.

  ‘Periodically the most intelligent species on the planet goes crazy and does truly depraved and appalling things to its own kind, with the most sophisticated tools at its disposal. Eventually, the madness clears and we all go back to walking the dog on a Sunday morning, wondering what on earth came over us. It’s like a terrible storm that sweeps across the planet until it exhausts itself. There’s nothing you can do but step back and let it pass.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I have no choice. I’m in the RAF. I’m of fighting age. I suppose I could become a conchie but I’m simply not configured that way. Never have been. Never will be.’

  ‘Annie doesn’t step back and let it pass.’

  ‘Annie’s different.’

  ‘If I’m no longer to be allowed to teach, why don’t I learn to fly, like her?’

  ‘Because she knew how to fly before she joined the ATA.’

  ‘You could teach me.’

  ‘If you think I want you up there under any circumstances in the current climate you are mad.’

  Teresa hadn’t been serious about learning to fly. She had suddenly felt a sense of dread about her final day as a schoolteacher, after which she would have all the time in the world to reflect on the terrible accounts Nick brought home from work, unmediated by the daily distraction of classroom drama.

  ‘How would you feel about starting a family when I leave my job?’

  Nick looked at Teresa, caught unawares by his wife’s question. Then smiled.

  ‘What brought this on?’

  ‘I have to do something with my time. And since I’m no longer allowed to be with children professionally and you won’t let me fly—’

  ‘Isn’t it preferable to start a family because you really want children, than as a substitute for a job you’ll no longer have? I’d like nothing more than to start a family. But on balance, I’d rather it was because you really wanted to have my sprogs than because you want to produce your own class to teach.’

  Having encountered many parents of children in her classes, Teresa felt few behaved as if they had actively chosen to have them. Most seemed to have been drawn along by an ill-defined impulse over which they had little or no control.

  ‘Does it matter, as long as we love them?’ she said, smiling.

  Nick took a long sip of Scotch and thought about it for a few moments.

  ‘I suppose not.’

  At that moment, the telephone began to ring in the hall. Both knew it would be for Nick at this hour. Teresa raised her eyebrows at him, as if to say, ‘Now what?’

  Nick sighed, set down his glass and hauled himself out of the comfortable armchair in which he’d hoped to see out the evening before bed. He gently kissed the top of Teresa’s head on his way out of the room.

  Teresa thought about the children she might like. Boys or girls? Little boys were more straightforward, more obedient, but little girls were often more emotionally sophisticated and interesting. However, on balance she thought a boy might be preferable.

  Then I can’t pass on to a girl the way I am. I would hate a daughter of mine to have to endure this. To have to force herself not to think of . . . certain people . . . because it could destroy her life. Or to give up a profession she loved and was wonderful at because she got married.

  The door opened and Nick returned, sombre-faced.

  ‘They’ve found the plane.’

  ‘The plane?’

  ‘The Heinkel. We had a decent fix on its location from the Observation bods.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘One pilot was still strapped into his seat. Another was dead on his parachute, hanging from a tree a hundred feet from the wreckage – sounds like the poor bugger left it too late to bail out.’

  Nick let out a deep, mournful sigh, knowing he could be talking like this about German pilots tonight and in exactly the same terms about his own boys tomorrow. Boys against boys.

  ‘And the third?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘Not found.’

  ‘What does that mean, “not found”?’

  Nick collapsed back into the armchair and let the air leave his lungs. He picked up his glass and swirled the Scotch around. He peered into the amber liquid, as if trying to divine the fate of the third pilot within its mini-whirlpool.

  ‘Poor bugger’s probably lying face down in the middle of a field somewhere,’ he said wearily, ‘waiting to be discovered by some equally poor bugger in the morning.’

  Nick poured the remainder of the whisky into his mouth and swallowed it. He looked over at Teresa.

  ‘Please don’t think about it, darling,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t,’ she replied, though she already was.

  We have to think about these boys. Even for a moment. If I was – when I am – a mother, I would want someone to think of my son on the night his plane went down.

  ‘By all means let’s start a family when you finish teaching. But let’s have girls,’ Nick said, laying his head back on the chair’s headrest and closing his eyes.

  ‘Lots of lovely girls . . . who don’t fly planes, or carry guns.’

  Teresa looked at Nick and didn’t think she had ever seen him so tired.

  ‘Some girls fly planes.’

  ‘Not in anger they don’t.’

  ‘I’ve heard Annie say she would if she was allowed.’

  Nick kept his eyes closed.

  ‘Annie says a lot of things for effect. You shouldn’t believe the half of it.’

  Nick calmly folded his hands across his stomach, and sat there, with his legs stretched out, like an old man practising the most comfortable position in which to be laid to rest. Teresa looked at him for a few moments.

  ‘Which half should I believe?’ she asked, knowing he was already asleep.

  Chapter 57

  The third German pilot wasn’t found face down in a field the following morning, or anywhere else. Nor the morning after that. By the third morning of the pilot’s body failing to come to light the authorities flooded the area with personnel and sniffer dogs, and placed the local population on alert.

  People were told to keep to population centres wherever possible, and not journey across country alone.

  Those who worked the land were told to work in groups, and to keep a shotgun nearby.

  Any sighting of any unknown person behaving in a suspect manner, or who looked as if they were carrying an injury, was to be immediately reported to the police. On no account were they to be approached.

  Any theft of clothing from washing lines, or discovery of an abandoned parachute, was also to be immediately reported to the police. Similarly, any fresh damage or break-ins to outbuildings.

  The authorities initially had no idea if the pilot was alive or dead, but they couldn’t take any chances. To try to prevent incidents of mistaken identity and a potential lynching if the pilot should be found, they banned unauthorised, armed search parties roaming the countryside, and emphasised that the pilot was more use to them alive than dead.

  The village school was closed until further notice.

  On the afternoon of the third day a reconnaissance plane swept low over the area for any clues to the German pilot’s whereabouts.

&n
bsp; In Great Paxford, women queuing in Brindsley’s for meat rations spoke nervously of their fears about the missing pilot; while their husbands propped up the bar in the Black Horse and outdid one another with gruesome accounts of what they’d do to ‘Fritz’ if they caught him.

  Parents tried to avoid their sons and daughters being scared witless, but in the minds of most children in the village ‘a Nazi pilot on the loose’ was perhaps the most exciting thing to have ever happened in the history of the world. Most assumed he would look and sound like Hitler. They did a splendid job of scaring one another silly, though all their games ended in the pilot’s capture and bloody execution.

  Theories abounded about the pilot’s whereabouts. One suggested he had landed injured, then hidden himself in woodland according to his ‘Nazi training’ to give his body time enough to recover before escaping – living off nuts and berries and anything he could shoot with a service revolver. Another suggested he had perished while parachuting down, but had landed in thick undergrowth, or in a ravine, his body invisible either from above or on the ground. Another thought his parachute might have caught a heavy gust during its descent and taken the pilot out of the area. Another proposed the pilot had landed perfectly safely, and left the region on foot long before the authorities discovered the downed aircraft and realised he was missing.

  In reality, no one knew anything. Yet it took very little to make people nervous, and generate endless speculation and rumour. The population had been primed for it since the outbreak of the war, and the pilot embodied everyone’s worst fears. In no time, he became characterised as a cold-blooded killer Nazi who would stop at nothing to slaughter as many English people as he could, children included. Suddenly, all strangers were looked upon with intense suspicion.

  The hunt for the missing airman even affected the Barden household. With Noah returned and revived, and his grandfather responding favourably to Frances’s offer to formally adopt the boy, Frances became extremely protective. When he played in the garden with Spencer and Claire, Frances stood guard at the French windows, looking this way and that for any unexpected movement in the shrubs, or around the large pond at the bottom of the garden. Sarah watched her sister from the comfort of the sofa.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re expecting to see, Frances. I very much doubt this pilot is planning to launch a surprise attack on the house from your bulrushes.’

  ‘Who knows what state of desperation he might be in?’ replied Frances. ‘He might be starving, driven to stop at nothing to find food. Or he might decide Noah could be used as a bargaining chip to secure his return to Germany.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said Sarah, despairing at her sister’s tendency to opt for the most lurid possible outcome.

  ‘My point is, none of us can afford to let our guard down until the man is captured.’

  Sarah considered her sister’s words for a few moments.

  ‘In the interest of fairness, if not rationality, shouldn’t you consider the possibility that outside of his cockpit he might not be the demon everyone assumes?’

  Frances wasn’t having it.

  ‘You do speak such rot sometimes. The man is a Nazi. He wasn’t dropping liver sausage and volumes of Goethe.’

  ‘You’re mistaking a man with his job. Out of his cockpit he’s no longer a pilot, but a young man lost in enemy territory.’

  ‘You sound remarkably charitable towards someone who has almost certainly been responsible for the deaths of many of your fellow countrymen and women.’

  ‘Young men have been co-opted to kill on both sides.’

  ‘We don’t do to them what they’re doing to us. This pilot could emerge from hiding and simply run amok, indiscriminately killing men, women or children. By all accounts, it’s the Nazi way. So please do not scold me for being overcautious where Noah is concerned.’

  Sarah sighed, realising Frances was not open to any form of reason on the issue.

  ‘Adam would feel tremendously sad to see Great Paxfordians reacting like this. Talking as they are. Whipping one another into a frenzy. Terror spreads by association, passed on by word of mouth. We shouldn’t be a part of it.’

  Frances baulked at the implied insult.

  ‘Being vigilant is not the same as being “in a frenzy”, Sarah. You know, I really do object to the way you choose to characterise yourself as the only calm, sensible person in most given situations. It’s the vicar’s wife in you, and occasionally it really grates.’

  ‘As Adam was at pains to point out in several of his sermons before joining up, while all Nazis are German, not all Germans are Nazis.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t he give himself up?’

  ‘Because he’s probably dead!’

  Frances turned back to look out of the window.

  ‘All the same, I think I’ll have Claire and Spencer bring Noah inside.’

  ‘Why don’t you do that. And then you can wrap him from head to toe in cotton wool and stack him in the cellar on the one remaining wine rack.’

  Frances turned again and looked at Sarah.

  ‘We are at war, Sarah,’ she said, her voice adopting the tone and timbre of the Chair of Great Paxford’s WI.

  ‘I know, “Madame Chair”,’ mocked Sarah. ‘The empty space in my bed each night is a constant reminder.’

  Frances was not put off.

  ‘In life as in war,’ she said, ‘we should prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Not the other way round.’

  By the early evening of the third day of the pilot remaining undiscovered, the village was starting to be consumed by mushrooming anxiety. People left their houses only if they had to. Though a few households had locked their doors and windows at night in response to the influx of refugees into the area, now every single front door and window was bolted shut as nightfall and rain swept slowly over the landscape. Men and boys looked out of windows and watched the ranging torch beams of official search parties in the distance, wondering how long the manhunt would continue.

  Whether it actually was or not, it felt to many Great Paxfordians that a malevolent force was among them, poised to do them harm.

  For the moment, it seemed as if their little Cheshire village had found itself on the front line of the war.

  Chapter 58

  It was still raining at 1.43 in the morning when the telephone started ringing in the Lucas household. Giving her all to teaching was the only way Teresa knew how, or wanted, to do the job, but it was exhausting, and she customarily slept extremely well. She was fast asleep now, and remained that way as the telephone rang in the hall downstairs. But if Nick’s wife slept like a log as a result of her job, then his own, placing him on constant standby, meant Nick slept like a twig, and he woke almost the instant the telephone started to ring. He hurried downstairs, knowing it wouldn’t be ringing at this hour without reason. By the time he ran back up, Teresa had been roused enough to register Nick’s absence from their bed, and heard him changing from his pyjamas into his uniform as quietly as possible.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she mumbled, her face buried in a pillow. ‘You’ve had word that Goering’s sending over paratroops to rescue the missing pilot . . .’

  ‘There’s been an accident at the station,’ he said, his voice low and clipped.

  ‘There are always accidents at the station. What kind of accident at the station?’ she said, trying to sound more interested in what may have happened at Tabley Wood than in going back to sleep. ‘Someone slipped on some oil kind of accident? Fell off a wing accident? Isn’t that the thing about accidents?’ she burbled softly, her brain urging her back towards unconsciousness. ‘They’re accidental. Let someone else deal with it . . .’

  She patted the still-warm empty space where Nick should be to emphasise her point. Nick was too focused on getting ready as swiftly as possible to react to Teresa’s inchoate train of thought.

  ‘Slightly more serious than someone slipping over. Two replacement Hurricanes were being delivered tonight. One lande
d badly in atrocious conditions.’

  Teresa slowly rolled onto her back and reluctantly opened her eyes one at a time, and tried to bring Nick into focus in the dark. He was almost dressed, putting on his shoes. She could now hear the sound of the rain being driven against the bedroom window.

  ‘How badly is badly?’

  ‘Pretty badly.’

  ‘The Hurricane or the pilot?’

  ‘Both. I have to go.’ His voice was professional. Orders given with ease. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  Teresa managed to sit herself up, resting on her elbows.

  ‘I don’t understand why you need to go. You can’t single-handedly win the war, Nick. You also need to sleep. You’ve been informed. You’ve no doubt issued some orders. What can you actually do in that situation? Even a wing commander needs to rest if he’s to wing-command effectively.’

  Nick did up the buttons of his tunic and looked down at Teresa lying on the bed.

  ‘The injured pilot is Annie.’

  Teresa was instantaneously a hundred per cent awake. She had been rather successful at forcing the ATA pilot from her mind over recent weeks, but all her memories rushed back in the moment Nick said her name, and she suddenly felt sick with fear.

  ‘Annie?’ she asked.

  ‘By all accounts, she came out of low cloud too fast. Perhaps her altimeter wasn’t properly calibrated. Made a very hard landing. The undercarriage buckled and she skidded off the runway.’ Nick tried to sound factual, but Teresa could hear the emotion in his voice.

  ‘Is she hurt?’

  Teresa tried to control her breathing so that she could get the words out without looking more concerned than Nick would have expected. As she did so she could hear her pulse pump in her ears.

  ‘I’ve only been told that she was taken directly from the cockpit to the hospital. I’m going over to find out how she is.’

  Teresa’s heart was thumping so loudly she thought Nick must hear it.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, swinging her legs over the side of her bed.

  ‘Little point us both being exhausted.’