‘See? I’ve kept my word. You are a millionaire!’ I stared at the number in the book. A one, and a row of noughts. I couldn’t believe it, even though I’d often handled and counted greasy wads of five thousand quid in notes. I couldn’t believe it, and at the same time it terrified me. A million quid, and three dead men . . . What was she? Most of the time I dumbly accepted her now; you can get used to anything after a while. But every so often I remembered what real life was like – work and sport and drinking with my mates, and then I would break out in a cold sweat and wonder what I was doing here.
‘You could do with a drink,’ she said, almost as if she’d read my thoughts. I suppose living together does that to people, after a bit.
‘There’s a nice pub down in Porlock Weir,’ she said. ‘I noticed it as we passed. Take an evening off. You’ve had too much of me, cooped up in this thing. Go on, relax!’
I fumbled in my pockets for money. She reached in her handbag and gave me five pound notes.
I had a good night; the ale was local, and the lads offered me a game of darts, hoping to win pints off me, which was their hard luck. Then we got talking bikes, and suddenly it was closing time and everyone vowing friendship like long-lost brothers. They left me where the road turns uphill.
It was pitch-dark; the gusts were getting stronger, though the rain had stopped. I thought of the van up there, rocking in the darkness, the windows curtained and gently lit with Calor-gas.
I didn’t want to go back.
I didn’t have to go back. I could just turn and walk the other way and get a hitch in the morning and be home by night with luck. It wouldn’t be pleasant; I only had my anorak, and the rain might start again. But at least I would be home . . .
But my rucksack was up there, and one or two other things I valued. I was damned if I was going to let her have them. I staggered on; I was half-sloshed with the good ale, so it took a long and meandering time. But I made it at last. As I opened the van door, the wind nearly ripped it out of my hand and down the cliffs out to sea.
‘Hurry up with that door,’ she said, just like my mum talks to my dad. ‘You’ll have the place freezing. I’m doing you some coffee.’
I shut the door. Then I noticed the way she was standing. She was as slim as when I’d first seen her.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ I said stupidly.
‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘You’ll wake them.’ And on tiptoe, she went into the sleeping compartment at the back.
Three carrycots lay side by side on the floor; and in each of them, a child slept peacefully. They were big, for new-born babies. (I was godfather to my sister’s, and this lot were bigger at birth than hers had been when it was christened at six weeks.) And they didn’t look all screwed-up face and wizened either; they were beautiful, and their hair was the palest red-gold.
They didn’t have a good effect on me; they did not bring out the fond father in me. In fact I turned on her.
‘You scheming bitch – they’re not mine!’ I was filled with rage and hope at the same time. If they weren’t mine, I had no responsibility to hold me here.
‘They are yours,’ she said softly. ‘Look at their hair.’ My hair is flaming red, and I’m proud of it.
‘Who are you trying to kid? You must have been six months gone when you picked me up.’
‘Did I look six months gone?’ she asked softly. ‘I’m the same again now.’
She took me again then, and the three golden babies wakened up noiselessly, without crying, and watched us.
Human kids can’t focus their eyes until they’re four months old.
When she was finished with me she got up and stretched like a cat, almost purring.
‘I am . . . happy. I am not alone any more.’ And she looked at the three babies, and they all opened their blue eyes again and looked back at her, as if they understood.
I pulled up the trousers she had undone (I was still wearing my damp anorak) and made a bolt for the door. She read my thought, but a second too late. Her hand grabbed my arm with fearful strength, but I slammed the van door on it and was away into the dark, sobbing and crying and panting as I ran. Behind me, I heard the van’s engines start; the lights came on and caught me, as I dodged behind a hedge.
The rest was a nightmare. I ran and dropped, got my breath back and ran again. I don’t know where I ran; sometimes I was in open fields, and sometimes crossing a road. Then I was among the sparse forest that sloped steeply towards the sea. And all the time, she was following me in the van; her headlights searched me out. I knew by this time that she could read my every thought, just as she could see the future and pick winners. But the terrain held her up: there are places a runner can go where a van can’t. So I kept ahead, somehow. I was under no illusions about what she would do to me, if she caught me. Even if I was the father of all her brood. Black Widow spiders, here I come. I should have behaved myself, been a good little boy and gone on producing kids and money. Three kids every three months; and how long before the kids would start breeding themselves? These creatures – if they could be produced in three months – could be breeding at five years old. Their grandchildren would be breeding in ten years’ time. With those brains, and looks, they could be running our world before I was an old man. And somehow I knew they would always be female; males they could pick up here – any male would do. Though I supposed bright males would be preferred . . .
Bright? I suddenly realized with an awful conviction that the slope to the sea was getting steeper; turning into a cliff. I was on the cliff-edge itself, and, far below, the rocks were curdling the sea to foam. And at the same time I knew that I was standing in a clear space unprotected by trees or rocks; the van’s lights pinned me like a butterfly to a board, as she closed in for the kill.
Something, I will never know what, made me give a last desperate leap to one side. I don’t think I consciously timed it. Maybe God helped me, or some little wild cunning thing inside my mind that didn’t want to die and knew better than me how to stay alive. The van caught me with its wing on the fat of my backside and flung me into some long grass. Paralysed with pain, I looked up as the van rushed past, curtained windows still lit and headlights blazing.
I don’t think she miscalculated; not Joan: nor would she be too slow to put her foot on the brake. She would have had it worked out exactly. But maybe the ground was slippery with gravel there: maybe the old VW brakes had not been properly serviced, back in that crooked Glasgow car-dealer’s yard.
The van almost halted, teetered. Then begun to plunge faster and faster. I think it turned over once, before it hit the sea; the headlights did a kind of cartwheel.
And then, though there was no sound over the wind and the waves, there was nothing left to be seen. Nothing at all. Joan, van, babies, bank book, cheques, million pounds, all gone. I was standing there in trousers and anorak, soaking wet. I remember feeling mad about my climbing boots and rucksack.
Then I turned and went back up a track to the road, and walked till dawn. I got a hitch at Minehead in a lorry going to Bristol. I went home. My parents were pleased to see me. I watched the newspapers for nearly a year, but I never read anything. Maybe the sea is deep at the foot of that cliff, or the currents very strong.
I wonder if somewhere else, at this very moment, They’re trying it on some sucker again.
If you see any naked blondes towards evening, mate, just bloody run.
Blackham’s Wimpey
Yes, I do fly in bombers. What’s it like, bombing Germany? Do you really want to know? OK, brace yourself.
Two more pints, please, George.
Well, I expect you’ve been bombed by Jerry yourself. Plenty of bomb damage around. And there’s you, sitting down in your shelter, behind your steel plate and three feet of earth, near wetting yourself and hoping the next bomb hasn’t got your number on it. Well, being in a bomber’s a bit like that, only the nasty bangs are coming up at you, instead of down.
But that’s where any similarity
stops. You see, a Wimpey – a Wellington bomber to you – isn’t made of steel. It’s made of cloth, stretched over a few aluminium tubes; a bit like a tent. If you try hard enough, and sometimes even when you’re not trying, you can put your finger straight through the cloth and waggle it in the slipstream outside. So when a shell bursts near you, you can see the shell-splinters going right through your fuselage, like a horizontal shower of rain, and out the other side. I suppose I’m lucky, being the wireless operator; I’ve got two big radio sets to duck behind. Though by the time you’ve ducked, it’s too late anyway.
And suppose you, down in your shelter, were sitting on about two tons of TNT just waiting for an excuse to blow up. And about a thousand gallons of petrol, in leaky tins that stink the place out, so you never dare light up a fag, however much you need one. And your air-raid shelter’s in a bloody express lift that keeps going up and down without warning, so there’s always a smell of spew about the place, even when your skipper’s not taking violent evasive action. And you can’t breathe properly without a dirty great mask over your face; and when you’ve got a head cold it’s so bloody freezing you have to keep taking off your mask to knock an icicle off your nose.
No, it’s not much like what you see on the movies.
And I think wireless ops have the worst job – because I am one. You can’t see a thing that’s going on, being sat right in the middle of the crate. There’s bits of celluloid windows in the side, but they’re brown with oil and smoke from the engines – they’re never cleaned, not like the windscreen and gun-turrets. My oppo, the navigator, even he’s got a little astrodome over his head. It’s supposed to be for taking directions from the stars – doesn’t that sound romantic? – but if he’s ever reduced to navigating that way, we’re really in trouble. He just uses it for being nosy, so he can add his two-pennyworth on the intercom.
Because it’s the intercom that keeps us sane. You see, in a bomber, the only thing you can hear is the noise of the engines; it blots out even the racket of bursting flak. And you get so used to it, it gets to seem like silence – unless one of the engines starts to pack up, then you notice fast enough. But otherwise, when you’re over target, you can see bomb-bursts and shell-bursts and flak-trails and even another crate buy it, and it’s just like a silent movie, especially with your ears muffled up inside your helmet. But there’s always the good old intercom, and all the lads yakking down it and even cracking mad jokes and laughing till the skipper shuts them up, like a, teacher with a rowdy class. And it makes you feel not alone. And a good skipper keeps asking you every few minutes if you’re OK, and that helps too.
My job’s all listening, not looking. I have my eyes shut most of the time; might as well be blind. That’s an idea, isn’t it; blind wireless ops – save the fit men for the army? Anyway, as I said, my job’s listening. I’ve got two radio sets: RT and WT. WT’s for long-distance; Morse code only. It gives us directions from the top brass, like old Butcher Harris sitting on his arse at High Wycombe. And the only thing he’ll tell you is to pack up and come home, ‘cause the cloud’s too thick to see the target, or maybe Fatty Goering’s not at home that night ‘cause he’s sleeping at his aunty’s. Now that’s a little signal not to miss; if you do, you’ll find yourself doing a solo raid on Berlin. Oh, I know that sounds great, like something out of the Boy’s Own Paper, but actually it’s not ‘cause all over Europe there are little Jerry night-fighters sitting on their little nests of radar, just waiting for you to fly over slow as the morning milk cart. That’s why we have these thousand-bomber raids: so Jerry’ll have so many to think about, he’ll run around in circles like a kid with presents on Christmas morning. Safety in numbers; if they’re chopping some other poor sod, they’re not chopping you. So I listen carefully for that little WT signal, which is not easy when the skipper’s taking evasive action and the engines are doing their best to take thirty-six hours leave of absence from the wings, and our guns are going full blast and everyone’s talking on the intercom at once. They’re not supposed to, but try and stop them when the balloon’s going up.
That’s all about the WT, except you never use it. Jerry would get a fix on you in a flash; then you’d have company. Only time you use it is if you ditch in the sea coming home. Then you send out Mayday on five hundred kilocycles and hold the Morse-key down for thirty seconds to give them a fix on you. Trouble is, everybody’s listening on five hundred kilocycles – air-sea rescue, German air-sea rescue, U-boats . . . take your pick. I’ve heard of lads freezing to death in the sea while two lots of silly buggers were fighting over them.
The RT – intercom in all your war movies – is a worry too. You’ve got to keep the volume just right, see, so no one outside the crate hears a squeak. Turn the knob too far – easy enough done wearing icy gloves – and Himmler can hear you fart. I’m not shooting a line, honest!
So what keeps us going? Actually, we get a lot of laughs. Remember the time you and me were outside Beaky’s study waiting to be caned, and we couldn’t stop laughing? Well, it’s like that all the time, almost. And we’ve got Dadda. Dadda’s a great guy for laughs. Who’s Dadda? the child asks. Dadda’s our skipper – the big boss-man. Dadda’s like God, only cleverer. Dadda has changed my life, the way God never did. I remember the first time we saw him.
We arrived at Lower Oadby one January dusk in ’43. Flying Wimpey Ills. Just the five of us, no Dadda then. The adjutant hadn’t time to bother with us; there was an op on that night, so he just shoved us into a barrack-room with the crew of L-Love. L-Love were a bloody good crew – done twenty-two ops, but they weren’t big-headed about it. They taught us a lot while they were getting kitted up. Things like always flying dead in the middle of the bomber stream because the Jerry fighters always nibbled at the edges. They weren’t much older than us and made us laugh a lot, though we did wonder a bit why they looked so pale and sweaty; the barrack wasn’t all that warm. And their rear-gunner was chewing gum so hard, his muscles kept standing out in knots all along his jaw. Anyway, they barged out saying don’t do anything in Lower Oadby they wouldn’t do. If you’ve seen Lower Oadby that’s a big joke.
‘They’re OK,’ said Matt, our only pilot, and we drifted across into their half of the barrack-room, inspecting their pin-ups and the photos of their girlfriends stuck on their lockers and touching their spare lucky silk stockings and rabbits’ feet. Not being nosy; just looking and touching so that a bit of their luck would rub off on us. They’d shot down an Me 110, a twittish night-fighter that had flown slowly past them in the dark without even noticing they were there. Apparently it had blown up like the Fourth of July, and one of its prop-blades had lodged in L-Love’s main spar without hurting anybody. Battered and rusting, it now hung over their skipper’s bunk.
The hut was quiet and peaceful. We stoked up the stove till its stovepipe glowed cherry-red halfway to the ceiling, and we all snored off like babes.
The barrack-room door banged open with a gust of snow at four in the morning. Somebody shoved on all the lights.
‘Good shopping trip?’ shouted Billy the Kid, our rear-gunner, always first with a wisecrack. We all sat up.
It wasn’t them. It was three stupid-looking RAF police with snow on their greatcoats. Carrying big canvas sacks in each hand. They didn’t say a word to us, just started grabbing all L-Love’s kit and golf clubs and spare rabbits’ feet and stuffing them into the sacks. Ripping down the pin-ups off the lockers.
‘Hey!’ shouted Matt. ‘What the hell you doing?’
One of the police turned to him, his face blank as a Gestapo thug’s just before he pulls the trigger. ‘They got the chop,’ he said. ‘Tried to land at Tuddenham and overshot the runway.’ He turned away and began throwing stuff into his bags with renewed vigour. None of them looked at us again. We sat up in bed in our striped pyjamas, hating them. Until they tried to take the prop-blade off the wall. Then Matt was out of bed in a flash.
‘Leave that alone. That’s ours.’
The
policeman reached for the blade.
‘It’s ours, I tell you!’ screeched Matt. ‘They gave it to us.’
‘Yeah,’ we all yelled. ‘They gave it to us.’
The policeman shrugged. He knew we were lying. But Matt’s a big lad and he was mad as hell. They finished stuffing stuff into bags and left, jamming off the lights.
‘Bastards,’ said Matt, getting back into bed.
‘They’re only doing their job,’ said Kit, the navigator. ‘I don’t expect they like doing it, over and over again.’
‘Some guys enjoy being undertakers . . .’
Nobody said anything for some time. Then, in the dark, Kit said, ‘They were a good bunch. I’m glad they all went together.’ Which was a pretty bloody stupid thing to say, but what isn’t bloody stupid on that kind of occasion?
Billy the Kid went out to the bogs and was very sick. We listened. In a way he was being sick for all of us; saved us getting out of bed.
We kept the prop-blade a week, then threw it away. It sort of filled the whole hut, like the evil eye of the little yellow god. We never tried interfering with those policemen again, except once.
Next morning, they ran us down to the dispersals to see our new crate, C-Charlie. She really was brand-new, which was funny. They normally give green crews the clapped-out old crates. Why waste a good bomber on a mob who are five times more likely to get shot down than anybody else?
It was bloody freezing, even wearing two sets of long johns and a greatcoat. We mooched around her, kicking things and grumbling; feeling totally unreal and farting and belching all over the crate and giggling every time. Does that shock you? It was partly, I suppose, to show how we felt about everything, and partly to try and get something hard and solid out of our guts which would never go away again. You probably know, that’s the way fear feels. And Billy the Kid kept bleating plaintively about who the other pilot would be.
‘Me,’ said Matt. ‘There is no other pilot. They’re trying to save pilots.’
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