by Andrew Greig
It was another warm morning yet high summer was starting to leak away, you could feel it in the air. As we walked to the station, Maddy looped her arm through mine and we swaggered down the road laughing and giggling like any shop girls. I wore a green dress that set off my hair and Maddy was in yellow and her bangles click-clacked all the way. With her golden hair permed up and the dress, more than ever she reminded me of the dandelions that were everywhere that summer, so brazen and irrepressible.
The train was slow and packed and smoky, as they always were during the War. Once we came to a halt for ages in the middle of nowhere. The conductor came by, Maddy grabbed his arm and asked what was holding us up because we had urgent appointments in London. I could have sworn he said ‘Swans on the line, miss.’ I shook my head to clear my ears then he said it again, pulled his arm free and hurried on down the train. Swans on the line! I could picture them draped over the rails, their long necks drooping mournfully, wings spread wide, like aristocratic suffragettes lying down in front of a race meeting, holding up this entire train of human fears and hopes, yearnings and frustrations.
‘I thought he said Songs on the Tyne,’ Maddy said. ‘Or maybe Some other time. Trust you to hear something weird.’
Then we giggled and squabbled over it till the train started again, but at intervals throughout the day the image came back to me. Haunting, stately, ridiculous, those swans would always remind me of being young and scared and high-spirited, in the early days of the War.
He took his time then. Walked right round the lochan to get the shape of it so he’d know exactly where he was. Then he sat down behind a boulder out of the wind and had his first sandwich and more tea.
He’d been lucky. The glimpse through the mist at the crucial moment had made all the difference. Gut instinct had told him he was heading the wrong way. So much for gut instinct.
He thought of Stella, wondering exactly where she was at that moment. What she was thinking and feeling. I love you, he mouthed silently into his Thermos top. For the first time he felt the true weight of those words, understood that the ‘you’ wasn’t just some projection like the plane silhouettes on the screen when they were doing aircraft identification. You was its own centre. And yet we’re connected. That’s the thrill.
He lifted the Thermos top and silently toasted her.
He considered bailing out off the plateau. All he had to do was follow the stream that ran from the lochan right over the edge, down the slopes and into the valley. Then again, he’d come this far, was sure now where he was. Just one more summit along a single bearing. So long as he didn’t miss the cairn. If he missed it, there was nothing but miles more of the same.
He got to his feet. Checked the bearing on the map and reset the compass. He wanted the clean sweep, to do all he’d planned, to do all the summits on this part of the Cairngorm plateau, as he and Leslie had failed to do all those years back. They’d run out of time and daylight – bad planning, not really realizing the scale of things here – and had to leave without the last peak, Monadh Mor. That had bothered him then and bothered him now. This time he’d do the lot.
His ankle was stiff at first and his body cold from stopping. The ground rose, fell, rose again as he held on the bearing. The edge of the plateau came in from the east at this point. Yes, here it was.
He sat down a moment on a rare boulder, right at the edge of the plateau. Then even as he checked the map and readjusted the bearing, the mist started to break up. He saw the slope ahead, then he could look back and see the lochan. Then he looked off to his left and the whole glen was there as the cloud tore open. He could see right across to the far side where the slopes rose again, see the summits of Braeriach and Ben Macdui, the shoulder of Cairngorm itself. Then the sun came through and in a minute he was sitting high up on the world with warm sunshine pouring over his face and hands.
He said Thank you for the third time that day and got to his feet with a big feeling pushing up in his throat. Bloody wonderful, so it was. Pity Stella wasn’t here to share it. He’d have to appreciate it for two.
He stood and appreciated it. The hours of sensory deprivation had made for this intense delight, just as the proximity of death made him feel life crawling across his skin. At least at those times when he wasn’t ill with dread. There had been so much dread, and so much elation. Some of it sick like when he killed. Some of it good and healthy, like when he lay on the bed looking up at Stella as she smiled down. Or standing on the track above the cottage where they’d lived together for one long weekend, suddenly aware of himself, his breathing at the centre of his world.
It felt like he’d lived several months in a week, several years in a month. The cottage seemed an age ago, and he’d come a long way from himself. A long way from myself, he repeated quietly.
Across the big valley he saw a herd of deer, their grey shapes drifting into a corrie. He put his hands to his mouth and hollered though there was no chance of them hearing him. His voice sounded strange to himself after hours of only his footsteps, the faint hissing of mist into grass and heather, the odd torn creak of a passing crow. Maybe he wanted to be sure he existed.
He shrugged the pack higher up his back and set off again, confidently up the slope towards where the summit must be. He pushed on up, whistling vaguely, happy and empty, feeling the sun and breeze drying out his damp clothes. Yes, and there was the summit. He strolled over and rested his hand on one of its big grey stones as though greeting a favourite dog. Done it, he thought. Stuck to it and did the lot. Only me. Feels good.
He found a place out of the breeze where he sat and had his sandwiches. Then he lay down in the sun, smoking and listening to the drag of the wind and the high fizzling of an invisible lark. With the sun filling in the hollow round his eyes, his thoughts slowed and finally stopped, and he was just existing.
Down near the river in the East End it looked as though some giant had walked at random up to a house or shop in the middle of the street, swung a vast boot at it then for good measure ripped off the roof and front wall. Wisps of smoke still rose from some charred timbers and such bomb sites were steaming with water. Usually a policeman was posted to keep children out and make inquisitive passers-by move on.
Maddy and I moved on. The next street was untouched, and the next. The one after that had a small crater in the pavement and all the shop windows blown in. We stopped in front of a greengrocer where a woman was still piling cauliflowers before non-existent glass. The handwritten sign above her head read MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.
‘Look at this one,’ Maddy said. Next to it was a tobacconist and hung in the missing window was another sign that simply said BLAST!
I smiled at that all the way down the street, and wondered if jokes could be a sign we would win in the end. Or perhaps there were similar signs hung up in shops in Berlin. What was obvious was that though the city had been bombed steadily for much of the day and the night for the past week, the damage was surprisingly limited. The rumours had been the whole place was rubble but it just wasn’t true. Shops and offices were open, buses and trams were running, trains were held up by swans on the line – life as usual, more or less.
We set off towards Oxford Street, wanting to get there and do some shopping before the lunch-time raids started. And it was on our way there that something odd happened.
Maddy was beside me, salivating through a shop window at a pair of shoes I thought frankly tarty but she pronounced smart. A shop assistant came into the window from the side then glanced up at us. She was near our age, nothing special about her, but Maddy jumped back as if she’d been punched. Her face was white. The assistant had her mouth open and looked as shocked as Maddy. In fact, she looked remarkably like her, maybe slightly older and slimmer.
‘Come on!’ Maddy grabbed my arm and yanked me off down the street. I looked back, saw the assistant still standing staring after us with one green shoe in her hand.
‘First time I’ve seen you run away from a shoe shop,’ I sa
id. ‘So who was that – a long lost cousin?’
Maddy didn’t smile.
‘Sister,’ she said out of the side of her mouth. ‘Oh, Gawd!’ And she pulled me into the nearest shop doorway and turned her head away. She looked in a terrible flap. I glanced back, saw a middle-aged woman walking past. Something about the set of her head, the determined way she was not looking to the side as she passed the doorway, made me wonder if she’d seen us. I looked after her and saw her turn into the shoe shop we’d run away from.
‘Is she gone?’ Maddy asked in a shaky voice.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But–’
‘Don’t ask,’ Maddy said. ‘Stella, please don’t.’
Then we went on our way, arm in arm, not saying anything. As we turned into Oxford Street the sun came out again and Maddy stopped and finally looked at me.
‘My ma,’ she said. ‘We don’t see eye to eye.’
‘Seems to me you don’t see each other at all,’ I said. A feeble joke, and I hated myself the moment I’d made it. ‘So what’s this all about?’
There was a long pause. Maddy looked at the sky, along the street of shops, at the pavement. She’d never spoken of her family, had always turned away with a joke any of my questions.
‘I haven’t seen ma or sis for nearly two years,’ she said at last. ‘We had … a bit of a do.’
‘And your father?’ I said. ‘What about him?’
‘You must be joking,’ she said, and her voice wasn’t charitable.
For a moment we looked at each other. Then she shook her head.
‘You’re a brick, Stell,’ she said, ‘but it’s not something I can say. Maybe someday …’
Then she looked at her watch and gave me a big unconvincing smile.
‘We’re missing valuable shopping time,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to it!’
She crossed the road and I had nothing to do but follow, thinking how you think you’ve got someone taped then realize you don’t know the first thing, and wondering when I’d finally find out.
The answer, of course, was never.
It was late afternoon by the time he struggled over rough ground back up the floor of the valley towards the bothy. His bad ankle was jabbing and his boots were heavy. The river kept getting in the way and finally he had to ford it, running across at the shallowest place he could find, with the notion that if he went fast enough his feet wouldn’t get wet.
He got to the other side, damp and laughing, then sat down and took his boots off, emptied out the water, squeezed his socks and left them out to dry for ten minutes while he sprawled in the heather.
Time to get back to base. He put his wet boots on and plodded on up the glen.
*
He saw them some distance off, two figures moving about in front of the bothy. He hesitated, then walked on.
The man in the grey sweater waved as Len came slowly up the slope from the burn to the bothy. He introduced himself as Alec Watson, held out his hand. Len noticed he had a limp and stood slightly off-centre. The other man was coughing inside the bothy, a harsh, tearing sound. Sweet blue-grey smoke rose from a neat stone-circled fire made of dry heather roots and a few bits of wood.
‘The kettle’s nearly boiled,’ Alec Watson said. ‘You’ll have some tea?’
‘Thanks,’ Len said. ‘I must be a few pints short.’
The cougher came out of the bothy in bare feet, hand over his mouth, introduced himself as James MacIver. Like Alec, he looked in his fifties but he was much paler and more drawn.
The kettle boiled, tea was made, Len offered biscuits from his pack. They sat at ease in front of the cottage in warm sunshine while the breeze and smoke kept midges away. They compared their days – the two men had come down the Lairig Ghru, the longest, roughest pass in the Highlands, were on their way to Braemar. Len found himself both sorry and relieved they were moving on the next morning.
The smoke swirled sideways and Jimmy coughed again, a deep, flat, tearing cough that made Len wince. He coughed himself red in the face but pale about the temples. He gulped tea, put two lozenges in his mouth and eventually the coughing stopped.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘The mist this morning is bad for my chest. I shouldna have come out, really.’
He got up and went inside the bothy, closed the door. Len could hear the coughing start again. He looked at Alec. Alec stretched out his bad leg, picked up a twig and poked the fire around.
‘Gas,’ he said quietly. ‘In the Great War. Jimmy’s embarrassed about it – best thing you can do is ignore it. Can I ask what you do yourself?’
‘RAF,’ Len said. ‘Pilot.’
‘Oh aye. Fighters or bombers?’
‘Fighters.’
‘Hurricanes or Spitfires?’
‘Hurris,’ Len said, staring into the flames, near-invisible in the brightness of the day, only their heat making the ground behind quiver. ‘We’ve been posted up here from the South for a break. Going back in a few days.’
‘I see.’ A long pause as they both studied the fire. Alec Watson wrapped his handkerchief round his hand and picked up the kettle to pour them out more tea. The coughing inside the bothy had subsided again.
‘A nephew of mine – well, my only one – flew Hurricanes,’ Alec said. ‘My sister’s boy. More dried milk?’
‘Thanks,’ Len said. He blew on his mug and watched the ground quivering as he contemplated that past tense. So many people now past tense, he thought. The worst is that you almost get accustomed to it, as if it were natural.
‘And?’ he asked. ‘I mean, what happened?’
‘Oh, he’s no deid,’ Alec said. He hesitated, glanced sideways at Len. ‘But he’s awfy badly burned. The surgeon’s done wonders on his face and hands, but still. It’s a terrible thing to say, but maybe he’d be better off if, you know …’
Len nodded. Then they both sat a while, drinking scalding tea and looking into the fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Mid-September
The raids started early afternoon and went on from there. At first I was very frightened. Then edgy. Then just alert.
It is, I discovered, impossible to be petrified for hours on end. Even if the bad stuff is happening just a mile or two away, that’s far enough. As though our fear and our sympathy, like our RDF, has a limited range. Anything outside it is just mush.
I winced for those who were getting it, but mostly I was watchful to check it wasn’t going to be me. And those raids were all directed at the river, the docks, the East End.
So the sirens started, people hesitated, moved away from the taped-up windows and got on with their shopping. The longer nothing terrible happened, the more normal it became. There were distant thuds, rumbles, faint sirens from ambulances and fire engines, all from the direction of the docks. As long as the bombing was accurate, in Oxford Street we were safe enough. It was nothing like the attacks on the receiver huts when we’d been the targets.
‘Imagine being trapped inside Debenham and Freebody’s,’ Maddy said. ‘Even if there’s not that much for sale.’
‘I know,’ I replied. I think we were helping each other be brave, and somehow we knew being jokey was the form. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’
Eventually I selected a pale green outfit on the grounds it made my hair look like it was meant to be that colour, plus a pair of what my mother would call Not Sensible shoes. We walked down the flights of stairs – the lifts all being closed – and pushed out through the revolving door and stood in the entrance.
The streets were nearly empty. The odd person went by at a quick walk, head down as if it was safer not acknowledging what was happening in the sky. A police car passed, then an ambulance. Three air-raid wardens hurried along, one suddenly clutched his helmet and looked up at the sky. That moment, that gesture, stuck with me for the rest of the War – his long bony nose, the gleam of his eyes as he swivelled to look up, the way he held his helmet on, his set lips. When someone, like my son, asks me about the bombi
ng in the War, that’s one of the two images that come. The other I try to put off as long as possible.
Once the ARPs had gone, we went into the street and looked up. The sky seemed filled with a swarm of midges, mostly very high up, it seemed like hundreds of them. There were some contrails, and the occasional line of smoke heading down, meeting the smoke rising from the direction of the docks. The air smelt of rubber and something sweet and burnt, like caramel.
The droning was faint but continuous. At certain points the long regular lines of bombers were stirred about as if someone had taken a big stick to the blue pool of the sky, and I knew that’s where the fighters must be. For the first time I saw directly the odds they were up against and I heard my heart beating in my ears. It was impossible. There were just too many of them. I could never tell Len this.
But right now he should still be in Scotland, safe for a few more days, so I could relax and enjoy myself.
‘Come on, Stella! Let’s get off the street!’
Maddy was tugging at my arm.
‘It’s dangerous! They’re too near!’
‘I know,’ I replied quietly, and allowed myself to be led in the direction of the tube station. If the trains were running we’d catch one out to the Farringdons’ house in Hampstead. We might be late, but that was understood. All arrangements were rather provisional now. The War was our excuse, and it excused a great deal – just how much, we had yet to determine.
In a way, I admitted, as Maddy and I hurried along, still looking up at the sky, it was all rather exciting, being bombed.
That night the three men lay talking side by side in sleeping bags on the hard dirt floor of the bothy. Jimmy was in the Observer Corps, Alec the Home Guard, in addition to their day jobs in factories in Clydebank. It was good for Len to be reminded that he wasn’t on his own. In fact every adult in the country seemed in some way involved in this war, and all had opinions about the way it was run. It wasn’t like the Great War. People were somehow more possessive of this one, as if it was their war and their country. It seemed unlikely people would go back to the way things had been, any more than he could.