This Buckby Reunion would probably be the last, he reckoned. The men who had served there weren’t getting any younger; in fact, most of them were probably already dead. Anyone who had served in Bomber Command during the war had to be in their late seventies or eighties. Old men, quite a good bit older than himself. Hugh would enjoy meeting them, which was one reason why he’d asked him for this particular weekend. Once those old boys had gone there’d be nobody left to talk about it, first-hand. Nobody who really knew what it had been like. He thought the local committee had done a good job of organizing things. They’d laid on a coach tour of the airfield, followed by lunch in The Grange barn, a dinner at a hotel in Lincoln and a service at the village church on the Sunday to unveil the new memorial window, with a surprise fly-past afterwards. All good stuff. An old soldier like Hugh would be bound to appreciate it as much as the even older airmen.
The Colonel had timed his arrival for late afternoon. He had avoided the motorways and taken a pleasanter, if longer, route on A roads which had led him through the late summer countryside up to Lincolnshire and its vast grid of flat and fertile fields and deep dykes. Bomber County, as Naomi had correctly called it. And he could see why it had been ideal for that purpose. Perched on the very eastern edge of England, it had offered a springboard to enemy-occupied France and Holland across the North Sea. And to Germany.
Guilt at having deposited Thursday in Cat Heaven stayed with him. The old cat had been shocked and outraged as Mrs Moffat had borne him away.
‘Don’t you worry,’ she had said. ‘He’ll be quite all right. I’ll get him settled in and give him a nice supper later.’
It had been impossible to imagine Thursday meekly settling in and he would almost certainly refuse to touch the nice supper. But a day or two could surely do no harm; cats went into catteries all the time and survived. Even so, the guilt kept creeping back. Though there was no real comparison, he was reminded of how he and Laura had felt when they had taken Marcus and Alison to their boarding schools for their first term. The sense of betrayal and abandonment, the terrible wrench of separation. The worry that they would be emotionally scarred for life. As it had happened, both children had thrived, which seemed most unlikely in Thursday’s case.
Buckby turned out to be nothing like Frog End. Instead of a cosy collection of houses huddled round a central green, they were spaced out along a straight road, with a brook running fast at the edge.
He found The Grange easily enough, helped by the Bed and Breakfast sign at the gates. Late Georgian or early Victorian, he judged. One of those nice old places that rambled pleasingly and sat perfectly in its surroundings. As he was parking the Riley in the driveway, Geoffrey Cheetham came out of the front door, followed by a black Labrador. He looked as hale and hearty as he had sounded on the phone. Older, yes, but weren’t they all? They shook hands, clapped each other on the back.
‘Same old car, Hugh?’
‘No reason to change her.’
‘Quite right. They don’t make them like that any more. This is Monty.’
The Colonel patted the Labrador who had come forward, tail wagging.
He was conducted, with suitcase, into the house which was as pleasing inside as it had been outside. It had the unmistakable look of a proper family home with paintings, furniture, curtains and carpets that had been unchanged for many years. The sort of home seldom seen in the modern world where the main aim was usually to make over and remodel. As he stood in the hall admiring everything, Geoffrey’s wife appeared and he understood instantly why his old friend was in such fine fettle. Her good looks owed nothing to artifice, and the warmth of her smile and of her welcome were as genuine as her home.
They had tea on the terrace. Proper tea made in a proper teapot with loose leaves, not bags, and poured out into proper cups and saucers. There were also cucumber sandwiches and home-made sponge cake.
Afterwards Heather Cheetham left them to talk. They talked, inevitably, of Anne and Laura and of the old days in post-war Colonial Singapore. The Tanglin Club, Raffles Hotel, the Cricket Club, curry tiffins, cocktail parties, dinners and dances. Days which, the Colonel thought, seemed so very long ago. They had been young then and still years way from retirement. Life, he remembered, had been very good. Busy, satisfying, happy. For his friend, he thought, from the look of him, it probably still was.
‘We’ve got six ex-RAF chaps staying with us for the weekend for this big Buckby Reunion,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We haven’t met them before but, apparently, they were all in the same crew at Buckby. I thought you’d find that interesting, Hugh.’
‘Very.’
‘I’ll take you over to the old airfield later on. It’s only a stone’s throw away. The land used to belong to Heather’s family but in the end it had to be sold off and the station buildings left to fall down. Fortunately, the control tower’s been saved and the main runway is still there.’
‘It was a bomber station, I take it?’
‘Oh yes. The heavies. Lancasters. Magnificent old beasts, weren’t they? The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight comes over occasionally in the summer on its way to air shows and I get a real kick out of seeing their Lanc going past. As a matter of fact, we’ve laid on a fly-past for the Reunion chaps on Sunday – not a Lancaster, of course, but we’ve scraped up a Dakota which certainly played its part in the show. This one was at D-Day and in France and, later on, it flew in the Berlin Airlift. There’s a coach tour of the old airfield tomorrow morning, and we’re doing lunch in the barn here for them. Heather couldn’t cope with that number on her own, so we’ve got caterers in to do the whole thing. And we’re going to the Reunion dinner in Lincoln tomorrow night – you’re included as an honorary guest.’
‘That’s very kind.’
‘Then there’s the dedication of a new memorial window in our church on Sunday.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
‘The ex-RAF who served here in the war raised the money and the village chipped in as well. We think it looks pretty good. And, apart from the window, we’ve had a remembrance book done with the names of all the men who died on ops from Buckby written in it – nine hundred and eighty-three of them, to be precise. It’ll be put on a table under the window and a page turned each day.’
‘That’s a lot of men.’
‘Well, they only had a one in three chance of surviving a thirty op tour, you know. Poor odds.’
Later on, they walked over to the lake, followed by the dog, Monty, and threw stale bread to the fish. The calm surface erupted into a swirling feeding frenzy and the Colonel wondered uneasily if his charming little pet shop goldfish would eventually grow as big and voracious. He hoped not.
Geoffrey said, ‘Your place is called Pond Cottage, Hugh, so you must have a pond.’
‘It’s a very small one. Nothing like this.’
‘Do you have problems keeping the water clear?’
‘It was full of weeds and slime to begin with but it’s fairly clear now.’
‘We’ve got this confounded blanket weed, as you can see. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get rid of it but nothing seems to work. I suppose we’ll have to get someone in to deal with it at vast expense. That’s the trouble with this old place, there’s always something that needs to be done.’
‘It’s a very lovely old place, though.’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it? To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I’d settle down at first, stuck out in the sticks. But now I find I don’t really miss London at all. How about you?’
‘The same. I’ve got rather used to the sticks.’
‘And there’s something to be said for living in a village, isn’t there? The only downside is that everybody else seems to know what you’re up to. Do you find that, Hugh?’
He smiled. ‘Very much so.’
‘Come and look at our bee orchids. They’re quite rare, I think.’
The mauve flowers with their furry bee-like bodies were growing in the grass on the bank. The C
olonel duly admired them. Orchids in general, with their glacial grandeur, were not his favourite plant but this small, shy, wild example was disarming. He bent down to examine it closer.
Heather Cheetham could see the two men from the kitchen window, inspecting the bee orchids. She had watched them walking round the lake with Monty at their heels, deep in conversation. Geoffrey would undoubtedly have told the Colonel all about the insoluble problem of the blanket weed. In fact, the water had never been clear in all the years she could remember. The lake was spring-fed with a thick mud bottom that got stirred up in certain conditions and there was really nothing much that one could do about it, or the weed. And the house had plenty of its own problems. Leaking roof, gutters rusting, windows rotting, mysterious damp patches appearing on the walls … All one could do was to keep applying band aids that cost frightening amounts of money. Of course, there was one solution and that was to sell The Grange and so hand over the problems to somebody else with deep pockets. Everything would be solved at a stroke; but it would break her heart.
The truth was that her stubbornness in clinging to her beloved old home was also monumental selfishness and she knew it. The B & B, which had seemed such a good idea at the time, made very little profit which was soon eaten up by the never-ending expense of maintaining the house. It wasn’t fair that Geoffrey’s hard-earned pension should be used to plug the gaps. And it hadn’t been fair, either, to expect him to act as waiter to the guests, or general dogsbody. Not that Geoffrey, bless him, seemed to mind too much – especially if the guests were interesting in some way – but his plans for retirement had been quite different. When she had first met him by chance at a rather stuffy dinner in London, he had been living an uncomplicated life in a pleasant and trouble-free service flat in Fulham; nothing to worry about except how to occupy his days as he chose. For her sake, he had given up that life in exchange for The Grange and all its problems.
She went on watching the two men for a moment – the tall, upright Colonel with his military background, her husband a good bit shorter and a little stooped from years of civilian desk work. They disappeared round the bend in the lake and past the willow tree, heading for the boundary of the old airfield.
If anything could make up for Geoffrey’s sacrifice it was having the old bomber station on the doorstep. It thrilled him to bits. And there was a group of like-minded men living in the village who did what they could to keep the control tower in reasonable repair. The idea was that it should be preserved as some kind of memorial – like the new window in the church.
Personally, she found the old airfield a sad place: the bramble-smothered ruins, the potholed perimeter track, the control tower still keeping its lonely and pointless vigil over a runway that no plane would ever use again. Too many ghosts. Too much suffering and sacrifice of young men’s lives.
On the way to the old airfield they passed a chicken run where a motley collection of hens was scratching about. They were missing most of their feathers and some had twisted beaks and overlong claws.
‘We rescued them from a battery farm,’ Geoffrey said. ‘There’s a Welfare Trust for Hens and they organize it all. I went to collect them last week at a service station on the M11. A woman handed over twenty of the wretched things in a crate. They’ve spent their lives in wire cages with no room to turn round and nothing to do but lay eggs. These ones are past their best but they’ll still lay, given the chance. I’ll let them out in the field in a few days’ time, once they’ve got used to things. You won’t recognize them in a few weeks. New feathers, new life, new hope, you see. It’s the second lot we’ve rescued. We gave the last ones to Heather’s daughter who lives down in Sussex and they’re having a fine old time. You ought to try getting some yourself, Hugh.’
‘Unfortunately, I have a cat.’
‘Oh, they’d probably get along fine.’
Somehow he doubted it. Thursday had never shown the slightest inclination to share his adopted home with any other animal, furred or feathered, or scaled either, come to that. The pet shop goldfish had survived – so far – only because they lived in the pond under water.
He followed his friend through a five-barred gateway and out on to a concrete pathway at the edge of a huge cornfield.
‘This is the old perimeter track,’ Geoffrey told him. ‘It goes all the way round the old airfield but it used to be twice the width. There are the remains of the hardstands where the bombers were dispersed. Wouldn’t do to have them all in one place like sitting ducks for the Jerries. He pointed. ‘The main runway goes right across the middle of this field where there’s that break in the corn, see.’ He pointed further into the distance. ‘The station offices, ops block, crew briefing room were where those trees are.’ More pointing. ‘Stores, link trainer, workshops, parachute store, squadron and flight offices, fire tender house, MT shed, photographic block, radar building, gas clothing and respirator store, crew rest and locker rooms. And that old T-2 hangar is used now as a corn store.’
‘You seem to know a great deal about the place, Geoffrey.’
‘I’ve got an old map of the site. I’ve studied it for hours. Fascinating. Of course, there’s not much left of the original buildings, but we’ve done what we can with the control tower. It’s still standing and in pretty good nick. If you like, we could walk over and take a closer look.’
They approached the building – a square block of concrete with wide windows at the front of the upper floor and a railed balcony with an outside stairway giving access to the flat roof.
‘Care to take a peek inside, Hugh?’
‘Certainly.’
Geoffrey produced a key to open the door at the rear. ‘Unfortunately, we have to keep it locked against vandals. Yobs come down the runway on their motorbikes after dark and smash windows if they feel like it. God knows what they’d do if they got inside.’
The control tower was an empty shell, all wartime equipment long since removed. On the ground floor, a dark warren of rooms branched off a central passageway. One had been the met office where the teleprinter had been housed, another had been the watch office, another the duty pilot’s rest room, another the pyrotechnic stores.
The staircase still bore the words ‘Flying Control’ on the wall, with an arrow pointing upwards. The Colonel noted, with approval, that there had been no attempt to repaint the sign; the faded black letters and arrow had been left strictly alone. He had seen heavy-handed and regrettable attempts to recolour and restore historic relics which, far from bringing them back to life, had resulted in them being lost for ever.
The signals office and the controller’s rest room were at the top of the stairs and beyond them lay the control room, spanning the whole width of the building and flooded with daylight from big windows. An old blackboard was still fixed to one wall, marked with lines for chalking up details of bombing sorties. There was a small table and chair with a visitors’ book and a pen.
‘The veterans usually sign it when they come back,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s quite interesting.’ He opened the book at random, turning pages. ‘They come from all over, of course. Every corner of the British Isles as well as the Dominions. Poles, too, poor devils, and Czechs.’
Over his shoulder, the Colonel read some of the entries. There was a space for comments but not many had given them – perhaps because the feeling was hard to put into words? The few were to the point. Sad to see the old place again. Brings it all back. Was it worth it? All those boys dead? We were the lucky ones, God knows why! Someone had scrawled bitterly: No thanks! No gratitude! I don’t know why we bothered.
The two men stood in silence for a moment, looking out at the peaceful peacetime view of cornfields.
Geoffrey Cheetham said, ‘I come up here quite often on my own – getting away from everything. Spending some time alone and thinking about things – not just the war, but everything, if you understand me.’
‘Perfectly.’
The control tower was obviously his friend’s equ
ivalent of a garden shed.
‘I tell you, Hugh, it gives me goose-bumps sometimes – specially in winter. I even fancy I can hear the bombers. Only the wind, of course. It can get pretty noisy up here when it’s blowing hard.’ Geoffrey went on staring out of the window. ‘Damned brave those chaps. And all volunteers. I wouldn’t have wanted to do what they had to do.’
‘Nor would I.’
The Colonel had once been inside a Lancaster safely parked on the ground and had pictured for himself how hard it would have been to bail out if the aircraft was hit on a raid. To crawl through the fuselage and clamber over the Beecher’s Brook of the main spar in cumbersome flying clothes to reach an escape hatch, while the bomber plunged dizzily earthwards in flames.
‘More than fifty-five thousand were lost and thousands more wounded or taken prisoner. Average age of a crew twenty-two, some of them as young as eighteen. Just kids, really. God knows how they carried on but I suppose when you’re that young you don’t worry so much about dying – you don’t think it could ever happen to you.’
The Colonel said drily, ‘That’s why fighting a war is a young man’s game.’
The same went for the army and the navy, he knew, not just the young men in the skies. Despite stark evidence to the contrary, most young men who went over the top, stormed the beaches, braved the perilous oceans, rushed headlong into battles against the enemy on all fronts, did so firmly believing in their own personal survival.
‘There were nearly fifty bomber airfields in Lincolnshire by the end of the war, you know Hugh. You couldn’t go seven miles without bumping into the RAF.’
‘No wonder it’s known as bomber county.’
A door led from the side of the control room to the balcony outside and, from there, they climbed the stairway to the flat roof and stood beneath the vast dome of the Lincolnshire skies. Men would have scanned them for the returning bombers. Counted them as they came home from a raid. Noted the ones missing. He wasn’t surprised that Geoffrey had imagined hearing engines.
The Seventh Link Page 4