by Peter Rimmer
“Possibly, but the country has had enough of war and they think Churchill is a warmonger; the ordinary people, I mean, who have the same vote as you and me. During the last thirty years, little over one generation, the country has bled to death. The men want a change and their women something to show for the terrible sacrifice. This time nearly everyone is under fire across the country and they won’t listen to the old boys with plummy accents telling them what to do anymore. We will defeat Nazi Germany but Stalin will still be in power in Russia, and communism sounds very attractive to a man with nothing whether he’s an Englishman or lives in one of our far-flung colonies. I doubt if we will be able to police the colonies when this is over as we won’t have the money, too busy paying back the Americans who waited for us to bleed to death before coming in on our side at the end of ’41. Most of my blokes on the squadron reckoned they wouldn’t have done that if the Japs had not bombed Pearl Harbor in their backyard. We’ve got to do a lot of clear thinking at Langton Manor or we’ll lose the place. Dad, now I’m off the danger list, you must pass the property into some kind of trust. The adjutant was a solicitor before the war and says we can avoid death duties, and, if we form a company around the farming operation, we can carry a loss from a bad year into the following season and deduct the loss from that year’s profit, reducing our tax bill. It won’t be just farming land properly anymore, we’ll have to learn how to keep our money. The socialists will take from the rich and give to the poor which sounds a winner to me in an election when the majority of the voters are poor. A majority in Parliament can give them the right to nationalise our land. We don’t have a written constitution like the Americans so there is nothing we can do but hand over the farming to the bureaucrats and then see how much wool they produce on this farm.”
“If it isn’t one thing it’s another,” said Adelaide, and for a while they listened to the fire burning in the grate.
“We must make contingency plans, carefully, and recognise the changes that are coming. They have already promised to give India back to the Indians for fighting with us against the Japanese. Socialism does not believe in colonialism. Anyway, I’m not sure the colonies have been making us money in recent years and the Americans wish to open up our markets to their companies, to say nothing of the Russians. I don’t think that we will have the strength to fight them. The island is tired, sick of war and probably sick of policing the world. The empire will wither away as Britain turns inward, more concerned with the welfare of its own people. My guess is, after this war, we will have lost the will to govern the empire.”
The clock on the mantelpiece wound itself up and struck seven.
“Even the clock sounds sonorous,” said Granda Harold.
“I’ll go up and see if the children are in bed,” said Adelaide. The two men watched her leave.
“You are alive, son, and that’s all that matters,” said Harold. “You just stay there by the fire. I want to get you something.”
The door closed behind him again and Red’s mind turned back to the rest of his aircrew, wondering how they would find their new pilot. There was a superstition about changing aircrew. They were flying again tonight. He looked up at the clock. They would be crossing the French coast, still with night fighter cover. He had long since given up praying for a safe return. Some lived, and some died. He was one of the lucky ones; or was he? With man permanently trying to destroy everything that existed he could barely see the point. He sat and stared at the fireplace until his father came back into the room carrying two bottles of Madeira.
“One for you and one for me,” said Granda Harold. “You and I haven’t got drunk together since the bloody Germans invaded Poland. We’ll talk of old times and for one night let the future take care of itself. There’s one thing an old man can still do, and that’s drink. As one of my pals used to say, ‘It can’t be all bad’. Cheers, son.”
Adelaide sat on the end of the child’s bed, still shivering with relief. Hilary sat up and smiled. The curtains were drawn tight; black curtains. There was still a blackout. William was fast asleep, his thumb in his mouth.
“Would you like to stay with us after the war, Hilary?” she said, stroking the dark hair back from his brow. “You can go to school with William. You’ll both have to start from the bottom… Can you read?”
“No, Mrs Langton. Never been taught.”
“Maybe some time in the future you’ll like to call me Mother… I’ll leave that up to you.”
“You think they’ll ever find my dad’s body?” said the ten-year-old boy. Adelaide turned away, unable to speak.
“I’d like to stay, Mrs Langton, if you’ll have me.” His voice was very small.
Will found the rocks at Dancing Ledge for the first time in the early spring. Someone had blasted a hole in the ledge so the tide came in and made a safe place to swim. He had come alone. The winter had been cold and was spent being taught how to read by his mother. Hilary had the hang of it in a month but Will found he couldn’t tell which was a ‘b’ and which was a ‘d’ and his eyes hurt after ten minutes and his thoughts wandered off outside the room and with them his concentration. It was the first understanding he had of the difference in Hilary’s age and, worse, during the winter, Hilary grew and grew and Will stayed exactly the same size.
A late flurry of snow in March had covered the farm with a white blanket and even before the snow had completely melted, the yellow, purple and orange crocuses pushed up through the long grass on the banks that surrounded the tennis court. Growing amongst them were tiny white snowdrops with delicate green shoots. No one had remembered to take in the net after the Battle of Britain at the end of September 1940 and the netting had rotted, leaving the drooping wire pulling the posts inwards to the court. The grass had gone rank and it would take an effort for anyone to get a game of tennis, a game Will had never seen as he was too young to recollect his mother’s tennis parties and the luncheon parties afterwards under the elm trees away from the court.
With the small duffle coat wrapped around his tiny body and to avoid any more arguments about his inability to read, or, more correctly, his inability to wish to try and read, he had gone off with two of the dogs for a tramp over the hills. With the need to stare at pieces of paper his headaches came more quickly so whenever possible he got out of everyone’s way, especially when his brothers and sister were back from school. They were now all at boarding school and only came home on half-term and holidays. What he heard about the boys’ school did not encourage him to read; it sounded a nasty place to go and live, just to let bigger boys beat you with canes and make you run around as an unpaid servant.
When he reached the top of the cliff, he found the barbed wire that ran the length of the coast: there were two lines of tangled hoops that were meant to make it more difficult for the Germans to carry out an invasion. A path led through the wire that led to the pool which was how he came to stand on the edge and look down into the still water. Out to sea, the heads of tall seaweed strands were nodding with the ebb and flow of the gentle waves; above and behind, the big granite cliffs guarded his solitude; seagulls were floating on the water and a strong, good smell came from the sea. For the first time that day he was at peace with himself and forgot that he was still unable to read.
He found a smooth rock nearer the cliff in an alcove that trapped the sun and let the warmth soak into his skinny body. One of the seagulls rose from the sea and lazily flew off round the head, calling plaintively as it went. Will picked up a small stone and threw it exactly into the middle of the pool, which made him smile and hug himself. The war, they all said, was nearly over and he wondered what they would talk about on the wireless that had found a permanent home in the cosy room and dominated their days. There would be no news after the war, of that he was sure, and Daddy would come home and he could go round the farm all day and stop hurting his eyes.
The dogs came back from searching for the stone he had thrown in the pool and shook seawater all over him,
making him shout at them to stop which made not the slightest bit of difference. The dogs lay down in the sun facing him and watched with big, soft, brown eyes. They had sprayed him with water deliberately so he threw them another stone and when they came back, he stood on his rock so he would not get wet.
Every day during the summer, if he could give the grown-ups the slip, he came down to Dancing Ledge to be at peace with himself and when it was hot, he swam in the pool with the dogs, learning from the Labradors how to doggie paddle, never once being afraid of the water. When the war against Germany came to an end, he asked his mother what they were going to say on the news.
“Oh, they’ll find something, William. They always find something disturbing… Tomorrow, I want you to come with me to Poole. Your father thinks there is something wrong with your eyes so we are going to have them tested. We will walk to Langton Matravers and take the bus.”
“Is Hilary coming too?”
“No, his eyes are all right and he can read.”
Whatever happened in Will’s life it always came back to the fact he couldn’t read.
“When’s Daddy coming home now the war’s over?”
“It’s not over in Japan and they’ve sent Daddy to America.”
“Where’s America?”
“A long way away. When you can read you’ll see it on the map.”
There it was again.
A week later, after three long journeys into Poole, he came back with a pair of round glasses in a metal frame that small boys were meant to be unable to break. The world around him was totally new, and he was able to see properly for the first time in his life and once the glasses had settled down, he could look at the pages of the books without hurting his head. He was eight years old.
The secrecy surrounding the trip to America for Red Langton and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was extreme. They were not even told the name of the American air force base where they landed or the subsequent staging posts, though both group captains realised they were somewhere in the Pacific theatre of war.
Cheshire, the most highly decorated bomber pilot of the war, was equally unaware what the two British observers were to observe. Only when the B-29 bombers took off on the last stage of their journey were they given any hint of what they were doing.
“Got ourselves a new bomb, skipper,” said the American liaison officer who had flown with them from London. “Skipper says we’re going out there to make a test and you guys are going to tell Churchill what it looks like. Told our skipper you two flew some of the first operations over Germany before we came in… You’re going to see something today you’ll never forget.”
“With two aircraft?” said Red. “Over Cologne and Dresden we flew thousand-bomber raids night after night.”
“And we finished off Jerry during the day,” Cheshire added.
They were flying higher than Red or Leonard Cheshire had ever flown before, their oxygen masks firmly in place. The four-engined bomber made as much noise as the Lancaster. The flight droned on. One hour later the American skipper came through the intercom to talk to the RAF pilots.
“We’re carrying an atomic device in the lead aircraft,” said the American. “We’re going to stop the war in its tracks.”
Ten minutes later a large city could be seen looming below which they were asked to observe through binoculars. They seemed to float towards the city above the sparse cloud layer without reducing height. Their own aircraft was equipped with sophisticated aerial camera equipment but they were told to watch the plane just ahead and to the right of them flying at an altitude a few feet above their own. Red watched the plane’s bomb doors open and then a fat, large bomb, just one, with a single square fin at its tail, dropped from the open bay and dipped towards the ant-like city twenty-six thousand feet below. For a few seconds Red was able to follow the descent of the single bomb and then he waited for the impact. Neither he nor Cheshire had the slightest knowledge of an atomic device though both knew that British boffins were working on a more powerful bomb.
Below him he saw a massive flash, having been told not to look through his binoculars until the bomb had exploded. It was a flash like Red Langton had never seen in his ninety-seven operations over Germany. When he quickly brought the glasses to his eyes, he saw the buildings below him disintegrate in an ever-widening circle and a cloud rose up to them that, looking back as they overflew the target, was like a giant mushroom ever-seeking the heavens.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” repeated Cheshire. “Can man have really done that to man?”
Below them, slightly to the rear, the city of Nagasaki, on the southwest coast of Japan had ceased to exist. It was the second atomic bomb dropped in three days, the first having totally destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
“We are the worst of the worst of animals,” said Red, realising why he and Cheshire had been chosen to watch the devastation. “And what we did to create the fireballs in Cologne and Dresden was no better. It just took us longer with a bit more risk.” Next to him, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was praying.
The war with Japan came to an end soon afterwards and President Truman rationalised the destruction of two Japanese cities had shortened the war and saved a million lives. More likely, thought Red when he flew back to England, it was revenge for the way allied prisoners had been treated in Japanese prison camps, only ten per cent of the prisoners captured at the fall of Singapore coming out alive. He had been taken over there to say it was just a bigger and better bang, and the bombing of Germany had been no different. But somehow it was, devastatingly so. It was more like an execution than a bombing raid. There was no defence. Not even a warning. Red always hoped that the women and children of Cologne had been in their undergrounds as the Londoners had been during the Blitz. Surprise attacks on military installations, including Pearl Harbor – which, if the Americans had been watching their radar screens as the British watched their VHF units during the Battle of Britain, would have been no surprise – were somehow acceptable to a man. What Red had seen with his own eyes was not acceptable and gave him a terrible premonition that a precedent had been set and mankind, all of mankind, would pay the price.
Will was unable to make sense out of much the grown-ups talked about but he was sensitive to their feelings towards him and each other. When they hurt his feelings, the ends of his fingers hurt and he went off into the woods to be alone. The laughter had gone out of his father when he came back from the war; everything was serious. For the first time in his life he heard the word ‘money’ used in a way he was unable to understand. Before the word meant what Dad gave him on Sunday morning before they all went to church. Even Granda was talking about money coupled with the words ‘bloody socialist government’, all three words being outside his understanding. The word ‘Hitler’ had been replaced by the word ‘Atlee’, both being spoken in a spit. Will thought a new war had broken out but there was nothing on the news which came right after Dick Barton, Special Agent, the most enthralling fifteen minutes of his day when he and Hilary were allowed to sit around the wireless before being bundled off to bed. Hilary complained to Will that if Will were older, he wouldn’t have to go to bed so early, whatever that was all about.
Hilary was going to school with him at the beginning of the winter term but would not be in the same class. Hilary was something the grown-ups called ‘bright’ and Will was something they called a ‘bit dim’ which was not true now he could see what was going on. He could see the tennis ball they gave him, along with a small racket, to hit up against the stables wall to ‘keep him quiet’, words he understood perfectly. Even at eight years old Will understood he was in the way, too young to be of any use to any of them including what had once been his best friend, Hilary. They all told him, the grown-ups, that he would find a little friend when he went to school. If it wasn’t for the wireless and Dick Barton, Special Agent with the galloping music that started it all off, he would have run away and lived in the deep cave that ran off from t
he Dancing Ledge… No one else could climb into the cave as they were too big and didn’t know the small hole in the cliff. In the cave he had a store of old candles that he had rescued from the air-raid shelter.
The two cars had been taken off their wooden blocks, the tyres having been blown up with a lot of effort from Granda and his dad, and petrol poured into a tube that stuck out of one side. The old batteries he had seen all his life next to the cars on the floor were no good and new ones were brought up by a man in a van and when they were put into the cars and a handle put through the front of the cars and given a lot of turns, both cars started for the first time in five years and to Will’s great excitement he was given a ride. After that his father went to the little church in Langton Matravers every day and Granda went to a place called the Ship Inn and was often very funny when he came home. Will’s Granda had a friend in Corfe Castle, a retired labourer, who had fought in the Boer War and the two old soldiers found a lot to talk about, according to his mother. Will hoped the old labourer would come up to the house, but he never did and the tension between Granda and his mother grew worse. Will thought everyone was very complicated and then they packed him off to school as a weekly boarder at a prep school in Poole which, they hoped, would make allowances for a small boy who had just come through the war.
The new school lasted one term. Will heard his mother in deep conversation with his father which ended in the dreaded words ‘it will do him good’. In Will’s life anything that was meant to do him good made him unhappy and the ends of his fingers hurt so much he wanted to hide in the woods. Next term they were going to send him to a new school. He would not come home anymore on weekends to see his rabbits. Thumper, the big Belgian black, would be left alone week after week and no one would clean out his cage and when Big Black’s wives had their babies, no one would take any notice. His rabbits, like himself, were a nuisance, and he did not want to be a nuisance or go away to school and not come home and all the other boys would tease him about his glasses. Miserable, Will stayed outside the window, behind the hollyhocks, unable to move, tears pricking behind his eyes.