Lotte liked it too.
They had already drunk a bottle of Mosel between them and were flushed with more than exertion. She leaned back against Werner’s encircling arm so that she could look up into his face and force him to look into her eyes. It flattered her to see the look of adoration in them and she derived pleasure from contemplating his handsome features. Not only was he very good-looking, she told herself smugly, but he was also so big that he was the cynosure of attention wherever they went and that attracted notice to her as well. She liked to display the fact that she had the best-looking and best-built escort in the place; and to show off her own beauty.
She slid her left hand down from his right shoulder and along his upper arm. She squeezed his deltoid muscle and his biceps, and smiled at him. She made a kissing movement with her lips and he laughed and blushed. He blushed easily and that delighted her because it confirmed her fascination for him.
He lowered his face to within a few centimetres of hers and said, “Schatzi ... there is something I want to ask you ... and your parents.”
“What could that be, I wonder?”
“Don’t tease. I think you can guess.”
Lotte was not endowed with much of an I.Q. and her banter and repartee were markedly heavier than her little feet. She said, “I’m no good at guessing-games.”
Reinert, always a prey to embarrassment, had been dreading making his declaration of love. Their relationship had been robustly physical in the free-love tradition that had spread south from Scandinavia and, fostered by Hitler’s manic zeal for sheer procreation, was bluntly matter-of-fact. It was not only to increase the population that der Führer had encouraged promiscuous coupling among the young; it was also to ensure their loyalty. He tolerated birth control as long as he could bind his subjects to his creed. The Reich depended above all on the fanaticism of its young fighting men. Make it easy for healthy young men to enjoy a good screw whenever they felt like it, which meant encouraging the girls to give themselves freely, and you’d got them in the palm of your hand. No political leader had ever tried this particular gambit before of fidelity by free fornication. It made sexual liaisons unemotional. Hence Reinert’s timidity about telling Lotte of his feeling for her. He wished Hans Ebeling were there, to help postpone the moment. But when Hans had invited one of his women she had said her husband was away and invited him over for a meal instead.
The close proximity of all the other couples on the dance floor gave Reinert the necessary decisiveness. He had intended to wait until he and Lotte were in bed; but here goes.
“I love you more than anyone in the world and I want to marry you,” he said.
This time it was his sweetheart who coloured. But, to hide her confusion, although she had anticipated his avowal, she laughed aloud at the same time. She had known what he was going to say, she was thinking, but when he actually came out with it ... more or less blurted it ... he looked and sounded so sweet that she was touched, moved, elated ... and mankind’s atavistic impulse to cover embarrassment with laughter had overcome her.
“You don’t have to say that,” she said loudly, making herself heard against a sudden increase in noise as they danced past the bandstand.
“But I mean it. Will you marry me? Will your father and mother object?”
Lotte broke off dancing, took his hand and led him briskly off the dance-floor. When they were seated again and he was looking at her — soulfully, she told herself — she commanded, “Say all that again.”
“I love you ... I never loved a girl before ... I want to marry you ... if your parents won’t object ... and if you love me and want to marry me.”
She reached across the table, resting her hands on it palms upwards. He took them in his and pressed them.
He’s lovely, she was thinking. Handsome and brave and some day he’ll be an Oberst like Daddy. He’ll have lots and lots of medals and be a famous hero.
“Of course I love you, Liebchen,” she told him. “And of course Mummy and Daddy will be delighted. They think very highly of you.”
This was news to Reinert. He knew what Frau Oberst Wiggers felt about him; and doubted that “thinking very highly” was an appropriate way of describing it. As for der Herr Oberst: that stern, duelling-scarred countenance had shown no flicker of interest, let alone esteem, on the three occasions on which they had met.
“But will you marry me?”
“I don’t see why not,” she teased.
“And when can I ask your mother?”
Lotte had a quick think. The moment Werner told Mutti of his intentions she would seize the excuse to leap on him and devour him with so-called congratulatory kisses. Mutti would gobble him up. There’d be no formal planting of a chaste peck on the cheek. Mutti would go for the mouth. And how.
“I’ll tell her. Leave it to me. You can write to Daddy and ask him formally. But I’ll telephone him and break it to him first.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“And when can we be married?”
She gave a lascivious little gurgle which was one of the traits that had enslaved him.
“There’s no hurry. We’re as good as, already ... in the way that really matters.”
He mumbled “That’s not enough, Schatz. I want the whole world to know you belong to me ... I want to be responsible for you ... to protect you.”
Still holding him tightly by the hands, she smiled with a gentleness he had not seen in her before.
“I adore you, Liebling. Let’s be married in the spring, then.”
“Must I wait so long?”
“Don’t be selfish! Just think of it: a lovely spring wedding ... sunshine ... spring flowers ... it’ll be so romantic and glamorous.”
“April?”
“May.”
“But that’s summer.”
“Only just. And we do want to be sure of a fine day, don’t we?”
“I wouldn’t care if we married in a snowstorm.”
“Oh, but I would. Just think what it would do to my hair ... and my veil.”
A look of alarm on Reinert’s face. “D-D-Do you mean a ch-ch-church w-w-wedding?”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t know religion mattered to you so much.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I see. Your parents, then? Are they ... believers?”
She laughed again. “Only in Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. But they like a bit of ostentation and an excuse to entertain family and friends as much as any church-goers.” She lowered her voice. “Let’s go ... where we can talk about this in peace and quiet.”
Her tone and her words were aphrodisiac and he was not loth to comply.
Her younger sisters were asleep. So were the cook and the maid. Her mother was out. The big house was blacked out and Lotte slipped in quickly without showing a chink of light through the front door. He drove around a corner and parked. He knew that her mother was aware that her daughter was his mistress, but he kept a decent discretion out of ingrained respect for his elders.
When he rapped lightly on the door, Lotte swung it back at once.
They mounted the wide staircase in stockinged feet, hand in hand.
*
Halfway there, Ridley knew he shouldn’t have done it. When he impulsively left his chair he thought he was just being polite. Now he admitted that his action was impelled more by four pints of beer than by a good upbringing.
The group-captain was looking stonily at his plate. His daughter had glimpsed Ridley from the corner of her eye and was smiling broadly while she engaged her mother in conversation.
“I beg your pardon, sir.” Ridley stood loosely to attention.
A pause of several seconds’ duration.
The group-captain looked up. “Yes?”
“I’ve come to apologise, sir.”
Another overlong silence under Groupie’s basilisk stare. “Why?”
“I thought I had made a ... an ass ...
a nuisance of myself, sir.”
“In what way?”
“I’m afraid I asked the waiter if he knew who you were, sir ... I mean ... wondered if you were station-commander at another bomber station ...” It sounded so lame that Ridley petered out.
“Bomber station?” The group-captain said it as though it were a reluctantly recognised obscenity.
“I’m at Saunderton, sir.”
“And I’m at Overstrand.” Overstrand was a fighter station.
“Sorry, sir ... I came to apologise because I’m afraid our waiter’s deaf ... and got a voice like an air-raid siren ... I thought you heard ... which seemed rather ... rather cheek as well as rude, sir.”
The group-captain’s mouth twitched.
“What’s your name?”
“Ridley, sir.”
“Well, Ridley ... our name is Ward ... and my daughter’s name is Shirley.”
Ridley’s intestines quaked more than they had ever done under fire. He might just as well have told me he wasn’t too dim to know what I was really interested in, he thought.
He bobbed his head in the customary at-attention greeting. “How d’you do, Mrs Ward ... Miss Ward ... sir.”
The girl and her mother smiled and said their “How d’you dos” with bright-eyed interest.
“Were you working this morning?” Gp-Capt Ward asked kindly enough.
“Yes, sir. We all were.” Ridley glanced over his shoulder to indicate his companions.
“Really? I hear you put up a good show.” He paused again, but this time not so disconcertingly.
“I’m afraid I put up a black just now, sir.”
Mrs Ward said, with a laugh, “It’ll be a sad day when young R.A.F. pilots don’t show a proper interest in ...” She raised her eyebrows and moved her eyes in her daughter’s direction.
“It’s very sporting of you ...”
Ward interrupted: “I’d like to talk to you and your friends. Perhaps you’d join us after dinner for coffee and a drink? We’ll be in the residents’ lounge.”
“Thank you very much, sir. Well ... I’ll look forward to seeing you later, Mrs Ward ... Miss Ward.”
“Shirley,” said the girl.
“I’m Derek Ridley.”
They smiled at each other with mutual pleasure.
“You were such a bloody long time, we’ve ordered for you,” Clive told him. “We’re all having hors d’oeuvre and steak. Did he ask you your rank, name and number? And whether you’d accept his punishment or prefer a court-martial?”
Ginger and Dusty were grinning their heads off. Ridley felt very cold and superior.
“They were all three very charming about it. We’re invited to coffee and a drink after dinner.”
Three incredulous faces looked at him.
“Say again?” said Clive.
“He’s station-master at Overstrand. Said he hears we put up a good show this morning ... asked if I was on it and I said we all were ... so we’re invited. I expect he wants to know more about the op this morning.”
“Give you a chance to shoot a line for the wizard blonde job’s benefit,” suggested Ginger, grinning broadly once more.
“I don’t want any of you trying out your rather dubious charms on her. Keep off.”
“We’ll try not to give you any competition,” Dusty said airily, “but it’s up to her, after all. If,” he added, “she is the discriminating and fastidious girl she looks, she’ll probably prefer me anyway.”
“Oh, my God!” his friends said in chorus. “She’s not deaf and blind, is she?” one of them added.
She was neither, as all four of the young gentlemen, each as susceptible as the other, registered when they formed up in the residents’ lounge and allowed coffee and cognac to be pressed upon them. Her eyes were the blue of cobalt and her voice was attractively pitched, with a slight drawl that was endearing because it was detectably her way of adding sophistication and maturity to her nineteen years and it kept slipping when she got excited and showed a distinctly unsophisticated tendency to prattle.
Ridley asked, “How long are you staying here?”
“Oh, we’re not. They just let Daddy use the residents’ place because he’s such an old customer. He was stationed at Overstrand when he was a flight-lieutenant and we’ve had a holiday cottage at Cromer for a long time.”
“Good!”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I was afraid you were only visiting.”
“We’ve had to give up our married quarters, to accommodate W.A.A.F. officers: like everyone else on the married patch. We’ve rented a house near camp.”
“You haven’t been to any of our parties?”
“No ... not yet.”
Ridley felt his pulse-rate go up as much as it had when tracer from the Messerschmitts was lancing at him.
“I hope you’ll come to the next one. It’s no distance.”
“Not in miles, no. But there is the fighter-bomber thing.”
“That’s all due to the fighter boys’ inferiority complex,” Ridley said at once.
Shirley laughed. “Funny ... that’s what they always say about you.”
“We always invite the usual “three officers and their ladies” from all the stations round about to our cocktail parties and dances and get the same kind of invitation to theirs.”
“I haven’t seen you at our mess. How long have you been at Saunderton?”
“Eight months. The invitations are always snaffled by higher forms of life. P.O.s don’t get a look in.”
“We’ll have to see about that.” Her eyes challenged him with a twinkle.
“I wonder if you’d like to come to the flicks one evening ... and have a bite here ... or anywhere you prefer?”
“Love to, thank you. I’ll be at home for a while. I’m joining the W.A.A.F. after Christmas.”
“Oh! I’d better be quick then.” Yes, Shirley thought, you had: why d’you think I mentioned it, ass? “How about tomorrow?”
Laughing, she replied, “That was quick.”
“Is there anything you’d particularly like to see?”
“I don’t know what’s on.”
“Well, you decide and I’ll telephone tomorrow at lunch-time and you can tell me where you want to go and when I can pick you up.”
“Super. You’ve got a car.”
“Shared with Ronnie.” He nodded at Clive. “We call it Göring, because we reckon that’s an insult.” She was laughing. “It’s old and scabby and uncertain-tempered.”
“I can’t wait!”
“What are you going to do in the W.A.A.F?”
“Fighter plotter: called “clerk, special duties”, officially. When I finish square-bashing I’ll do a course at Bawdsey, which will be nice and near home.”
“Good.”
Group-captain Ward did not, in fact, ask them anything about their sortie that morning; until his wife and daughter had taken themselves off for a moment: when he put a few crisp questions, nodded understandingly and said “Well, you chaps are getting a bit more of a chance to get stuck in than we are, so far. I wish we could give you more support. I’d like to escort you there and back. What d’you think about that?”
“It would be wizard, sir,” they said. “Could you do it?”
“With long-range tanks. But to cover the Saunderton Wing, we’d need to go ahead of you and refuel somewhere further north. And then the squadrons up there would say “why can’t we do the job?” Which would be fair enough.”
“Why don’t we have any escort, sir?” Ridley asked.
The group-captain changed the subject by rising from his chair and saying, “I’m going to have a pee, and when my girls come back I’m afraid we’ll have to go.”
There was time for a final pint before the bar closed and when they returned to the mess the decibel level in the anteroom was already high enough to fill the entrance hall.
It fairly broke the family’s heart,
When Lady Jane became a ta
rt.
But blood is blood and race is race,
And so, to save the family face,
They bought her an expensive flat
With “Welcome” written on the mat.
It was not long ere Lady Jane
Brought her patrician charms to fame:
A clientele of sahibs pukkha
Who regularly came to — ’er.
And it was whispered without malice
She had a client from The Palace.
Ridley, joining lustily in the singing, thought what a decent type Gp-Capt Ward was. He never used the word “nice”: it was too insipid; but the group-captain was just what his mother would call “a thoroughly nice man” and he knew just what she meant. He couldn’t better it. Not with six pints of bitter and a cognac inside him and a fresh pint in his hand.
As for Shirley! He had already been accused earlier that day of being literally (in the sense associated with literature) supercilious, so he desisted momentarily from roaring out the frisky verses about Lady Jane and searched his memory for suitable lines to describe the object of his fervid interest.
Presently memory came up with:—
When I dyed last, and, Deare, I dye
As often as from thee I go,
Though it be but an hour agoe,
And Lovers houres be full eternity ...
John Donne again. He wondered what Donne would have written on the theme that war concentrates a man’s mind marvellously: not on death, but on love.
In fact, he marvelled that it had taken a war to make him fall in love for the first time.
Four
Declaration of war had found Bomber Command with 53 squadrons. Each was established for 16 aircraft. Instead of the 848 that was the Command’s theoretical strength, there were only 272 ready for action. This disparity was caused by sending 20 squadrons to France, by rendering 20 squadrons non-operational for sundry reasons such as direction to other duties, and by servicing problems on the still innovative Hampdens, Wellingtons and Whitleys.
This compared with a Luftwaffe strength of 1,550 bombers and 1,180 fighters: of which 400 were described as “heavy” fighters i.e. with an air-gunner in addition to the pilot.
At that time, although single-seater fighters predominated in all air forces, even the R.A.F. had its heavy fighters: Blenheims were used for interception as well as bombing and reconnaissance.
Bombs Gone Page 4