That Summer

by Andrew Greig

  As it was, the 12 Group, normally kept back well north of the Thames, for once got a ‘Big Wing’ of five squadrons assembled in time above Duxford. They flew south, too late to stop the attack but in time to fall on a bomber fleet already shaken and scattered by the 11 Group fighters. Douglas Bader’s 242 Hurricane squadron, together with those of the Polish 302 and the Czech 310 – fresh and frustrated at missing the action for so long – cut the bombers to ribbons while the two fresh Spitfire squadrons took on the Me109 fighters.

  The result was not quite the massacre proclaimed in the papers next morning, but it made a nonsense of the Luftwaffe pilots’ leaders’ claim the RAF was nearly defeated. Even as Len was hobbling in a happy daze through the deep valley of the Lairig Ghru, the last German planes were limping home.

  He came to another bothy late in the afternoon, sat down by it to have a precious cigarette, his second-last, and check the map. He’d seen no one all day – a few grey-headed crows and a couple of kestrels were the only living things he’d met.

  He went inside and lay down and snoozed a while. While he slept the Luftwaffe launched the second wave of attacks on London and the factories. The sequence was the morning all over again: RAF fighters, many of them fresh, falling in numbers on vast formations of tired airmen who had been told to expect no significant resistance. The loss was not just that of aircraft and pilots, it was in airmen’s morale, in the Luftwaffe’s belief that they were winning this struggle.

  The luxury of sleep at any time of day, Len couldn’t have enough of it. He stretched, yawned, then went back to sleep again. When he woke again, a bit shivery and cold, he went outside and saw that the evening sun was breaking through, and he decided to stay there the night and go on to Aviemore tomorrow. Still get back to base in time.

  When the sun fell behind the hills, it got cool and he gathered materials and built a fire, outside in a blackened ring of stones. It may have been Alec and Jimmy’s. He wondered if they were in Braemar now, with Jimmy coughing up what remained of his lungs.

  He was shocked to realize he hadn’t thought of Stella for hours. In fact he hadn’t thought of anything for hours, just putting one foot in front of another as he pushed his way up the great valley to its midpoint then down the far side. His head was still full of it – the wind over the rocks, the occasional harsh cry of a bird, the scuff of his feet and the rattle of pebbles, the great slopes rising high and bare on either side as he picked a way through the valley of stone towards Aviemore.

  He had been blank for hours on end though he’d come here to think. Maybe blankness was a kind of thinking. Maybe just feeling here and present was more than enough, was everything. At the end of his life that’s all there would be, one last moment.

  At least live it, you fool. Don’t hang back.

  He fed the fire, ate, then looked into the flames again as night came on with a clearing sky. He leaned back on his elbows, feeling cool on one side and scorched on the other. Orion was clear and the Pleiades were rising over the shoulder of Cairngorm. Or setting?

  It seemed important to know. He went into the bothy and came out with his sleeping bag, unrolled it on the ground, made a pillow of his spare sweater and trousers then got inside. He lay a long time looking up at the stars. He felt himself expand into the hugeness where there was no terror and no killing and life was much much bigger than a cramped cockpit in a jolting sky.

  Oh, and the Pleiades were rising. He noted it in his diary, then curled deeper into his sleeping bag. By the time they were overhead, he was asleep. And the lights had finally gone out in Goering’s chateau headquarters near Saint Malo, where the Luftwaffe command had been collating the day’s climactic events. They were ready to admit not defeat but the absence of victory, which would be enough to have Sea Lion postponed. Still, the nightly bombing raid on London would go ahead.

  That evening, after a quiet day – I mean, no drinking and only a few distant explosions – Maddy and I went on the bash with Foxy and the cousins, John G. (who looked rather sheepish, I thought, and distinctly less handsome) and Gerald, out to one of the big pubs that had a dance floor. There were a lot of uniforms there, mostly in small groups talking to each other, gesturing and laughing. I recognized it by now, recognized it from myself, the too-much-brightness, the eager hilarity.

  I seemed to have mislaid my sense of connection. There was Len, but he was too far away. Mostly I sat out the dancing and sipped port by the bar, watching John G. and Foxy – now free from the guardian aunts – sashaying past in a passionate foxtrot. I noticed he had the same trick with her, putting her hand on his waist, murmuring in her ear till she threw her head back and laughed. Last night my Len had seemed rather ingenuous in comparison with these people – shy and young, full of silences and sudden blurts. Unsophisticated.

  The violinist sawed away, the clarinet bleated, the piano shivered out its tune while the bass thumped and drums swished. They were playing ‘These Foolish Things’, I remember that clearly. Gerald and Maddy twirled by, his hands were all over her and she winked at me. She was in a sleeveless satin frock with very little back. She must have got it before the War, it wasn’t the kind of thing that came with coupons. I smiled back, she waved her glittery bangles at me and whirled away.

  Oh we’re a fast set. All this laughter and carry-on while we can. The quick, I thought, the quick and the dead. And Len, who I was ready to betray with a kiss last night, seems sincere and open, my only true one.

  I ached for him. I longed to tell him what he was to me. That I’d only now ceased playing at love. That though I’d no intention of ceasing to laugh, I was serious.

  There were a couple of deep loud thumps that didn’t come from the drummer. I looked towards him. He seemed puzzled, head cocked to one side, then there was a roar and the floor reared up and the roof came down and they met in mid-air where the flash was brightest.

  *

  Someone was sobbing. I sat up and saw my hand was bleeding. I grabbed my wrist to cut off circulation and for some reason stuck my bad hand in my mouth. Blood? Only port wine. Steam hissed from a severed pipe, somehow the lights were still on, a few of them. People were slowly getting to their feet, doing foolish things like setting tables upright or running hands through their hair. A man came uncertainly towards me, his head and face and shoulders white with plaster dust, making him look like his own ghost. It was so comical I sat on the floor and laughed as he came closer.

  He held out his hand to help me up.

  ‘Stella,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  It was Roger. Good old heartbreaker Roger.

  *

  I think I must have fainted for a few seconds, though that’s excusable what with the bomb blast and all. I was lying flat on the floor with Roger kneeling by my head. I was gratified to see he seemed quite concerned.

  ‘Are you hurt, Stella?’

  I shook my head. I was looking past him to the heap of ceiling and beams piled up in the middle of the floor. I focused on a long bare arm sticking out from under the pile. I saw blue-green and rose glittery bangles hanging loose around the dropped wrist.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘Help my friend.’

  ‘Had a good time?’ Dusty Miller asked as the car swung down the road next morning. ‘Head better, I trust. London’s been taking a pounding but they’ve finally left the sector stations alone. And the RDF stations, you’ll be glad to hear. The lads in 12 Group are all talking about getting big wings up ‘cause we’ve got more time – I mean, there’s bloody miles of bombers coming through, day and night, plenty for everyone. And it seems like the 109s have been ordered to stay close to them, which is good news for us. Bloody wizard, eh? We’re heading off tomorrow and we’ll be flying the next day so that’s what’s happening. Oh, and we’ll be eating grouse for the next week or so, what with the CO and the chaps having a couple of good days …’

  I sat back and nodded and grunted at intervals while the stubble fields flashed past. I was gladder than e
ver that I’d politely refused Dusty’s offer to come along for the walk. A nice enough chap but, as Alec Watson would say, a terrible blether. I didn’t want blether, or this speed. I wanted more and more silence and stillness.

  I pulled out my last cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply, feeling the sweet rasp off the back of my throat. Silence and stillness were going to be in short supply. It wasn’t exactly what a fighter pilot lived for. Now I had to be noisy, assertive, quick, if I wanted to survive and be any use.

  The roadside bushes swung away as we shot by. Here we go, I thought. Here we bleeding go.

  Perhaps we could have saved her. If we’d been quicker. If we’d been trained. Once we’d torn away the rubble, we might have found a way to make her chest rise again.

  If wishes were fishes, my dad used to intone into his beer, most would swim free.

  But many don’t swim free, and so I sat dry-eyed into the small hours back at the Farringdons, remembering Maddy. Roger – who was not on the convoys at all, but back home on leave – came back with us, washed off his ghost-dust and was kind. He brought tea and listened as I talked of the drinks we’d drunk, dances danced, confessions shared. Above all, the laughter. For she, like Tad, knew how to laugh.

  At the thought of Tad, my heart squeezed. Either I or Len would have to tell him.

  Leave that till tomorrow. For tonight there was the remembering. Roger knew me – well, he was the first man to have known me – and it was oddly easy to glance into his pale eyes and talk about my snobbery with regards to Maddy. How I’d looked down on her bright breeziness as somehow coarse, not to be taken seriously even as I admired and envied it. As if she was somehow less of a person because she had been educated less and laughed more loudly in public places. As if because she was free and easy with men she was not a good woman.

  I think it was in the course of that long night that I finally put my insecure snobbery behind me. Just as I discovered that my long-held ache about Roger was that of bruised pride, not undying love. I told him as much. I told him he’d been quite right, he owed me nothing and I’d needed him to leave me to grow up myself. He had been my first lover and he was right not to feel guilty or responsible about that. I now gave that love to another man.

  He nodded but couldn’t look at me. I think he was embarrassed. I’d never talked like this before. I’d wept, shouted, been silent or sarcastic, but I’d never been open.

  Finally I slept, in the bed looking down onto the garden where I’d so nearly made an idiot of myself before Maddy had got in the way. Across the room the other bed was silent and flat. Though there would surely some day be laughter again, and even light-heartedness, I’d left my long drawn-out adolescence behind on a ruined dance floor, under a pile of rubble and broken beams and moonlight pouring in where the roof should be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Mid-September

  It was the engines that woke me. Rolls-Royce Merlins passing low overhead, a dozen or more. I was back at base in the same old bunk bed and the early-morning shift was going into action. The new sergeant pilots, Day and Dixon, were soundly asleep, presumably dreaming of death or glory.

  I lay in the half-light, remembering leaving the airfield near Aberdeen. That lift as I came unstuck from the earth again. The sense of dreamy freedom, for all the noise, as I watched dabs of clouds passing by beneath, and below them the green fields, roads and farmhouses, as we set our course for the War. I still loved flying, that was something. As Tad liked to say, it was just the shooting I wasn’t so keen on.

  The brisk double tap on the door. ‘Morning, Stevie.’ ‘Morning, sir.’ Mug of tea – a brief memory of being handed tea in the bothy by Alec, that peace already so far behind – sign the chit. How it comes back, the routine.

  Day and Dixon were already talking eagerly of getting up there and tangling with the Hun. I couldn’t get excited. The rage that had followed Stella’s dad and Stella herself getting bombed, even that had gone. All that was left was the routine. I guess that made me an old hand. A near-ace in this desperate pack. Ho hum.

  Routine. Yet lying there waiting for the tea to cool enough to drink, listening to the others’ eager conversation, it seemed such a bizarre thing to do. To get dressed, have breakfast, then wait to fly and kill or be killed.

  But it’s the one thing I’m trained and fitted for. So I got some tea down my throat and tried to get myself in the mood. The main thing was to do it, to get up there and break up the bombers and get through to tonight to see Stella again. If I stayed passive and dreamy like this, I was a dead man.

  I put my tea aside and swung my legs out of bed. Breakfast, then a game of table tennis with Tad or Dusty or Paddy McNally to get the aggression going and the reflexes on the mark. Trigger-happy, that’s what I must be again.

  I’m on the train out of the city as the day’s raids begin. A neat, white-haired man opposite chats me up in a fatherly way, and the two soldiers by the door keep glancing and grinning, but it’s all right. Small things can’t bother me today. I’m impervious.

  Maddy’s weekend case is in the rack above my head, next to mine. I’ll take it round to her billet while they try to trace the family she refused to see or talk to me about. But I want to hang on to the gaudy bracelets she wore.

  Lord, when this war is over we’ll want non-events. We’ll not talk about it to our children and we’ll try to give them the luxury of boredom, to make life so safe and reliable they’ll probably rebel and make something of their own. But not war, please God, not war.

  And Len and I, we’ll not talk about it in front of the children. At most we’ll give them trifles, little silly stories. The real thing, what it really felt like, we’ll keep between ourselves. We’ll keep it inside ourselves, for it has made us what we are.

  The train stops. After a long time we’re told we have to leave it and get on another. No reason is given. That’s the War for you. The old man disappears. I stand with the soldiers on the platform and they offer me cigarettes. I take them, smile at their chat-up lines. One of them is even rather good-looking, but that’s all right.

  Then I think how we’d all be more animated if Maddy were here, how easily she could have been here, cackling with laughter, returning their blue jokes with bluer. And then I have to go and sit inside the Ladies and let the water come down my face for a while.

  The new train comes and I go out to meet it. The soldiers share my compartment but see I’m not in the mood now. The authorities are all notified. I gave them her billet’s address and phone number and it’s up to them to find her family. There’s only Tad to tell and I dread that.

  I sit back and close my eyes, let the changing sunlight flicker inside my eyelids. As I turn away from the window, her bracelets rattle and clack restlessly in the pocket of my coat.

  Hundreds of them, fucking hundreds, spread back for miles towards the south coast. You could practically walk on them all the way to London. The bombers were stacked squadrons, Heinkels and Dorniers by the look of them. I stuck the oxygen mask to my face and pushed the throttle through the gate as we rose to meet them through thin cloud. Then I saw above them the fighter-bomber escort, the Me110s. And above that, tiny midge-like specks I knew to be Me109s. So now the escorts had to be escorted. Surely that was a good sign. We had made a difference.

  I was trying to remember how to do this. For the first time I was leading a section. Checked Coco to my right, Paddy McNally sound to my left, Dixon struggling behind. We were climbing but not quickly enough. Way up ahead the Polish and Czech squadrons in Spits were piling into the escorts, the Big Wing theory working at last. Through the last of the cloud now, 17,000 feet, the city hidden below. They know nothing about us. Maybe Stella is still there.

  We’re closing on them. Oh, God. What do I do? Time to get up-sun, or take them from below? I’m meant to lead. And here it comes at last, that thick ball rising in my throat, my hands shaking on the shaking controls. Heart-beat thumping in my ears. Here we go.

  �
��Engaging enemy. Follow me in. Watch your backs, chaps!’

  Oh, my God. My God. Get us through this.

  *

  So I led my section down into the bombers and was so busy flying and trying not to collide with anything that I forgot to fire. Simply forgot that’s what I was there for. Already I sensed how the week off had made me slower.

  Then I pulled out of the dive, came up on one from below, a perfect line of attack safe from his rear guns. I closed on him, flicked off the safety then realized I hadn’t set my gun sights. Cursed, sheered off. I glimpsed Coco rushing past. Paddy McNally was still glued to my left. Dixon seemed to have disappeared.

  Set the sights with one hand, checked my tail. The 109s were coming down, arrive in maybe thirty seconds. Just enough. I swerved back in at the formation, let off a few seconds of unlikely deflection shooting, saw tracer coming my way and instinctively ducked, as though that could make any difference. A big thump, my kite juddered then fell away, whirling like a sycamore seed. Dropped down right out of battle from 15,000 feet, tailplane looked mostly shot away.

  I reached for the hood as we went down through cloud, then remembered London was below. Didn’t want my plane to drop onto some poor air-raid chap on the street, some Alec or Jimmy, so thought I’d have another go at controlling it. A long time fighting with the controls then suddenly it came out of the spin. I straightened her up and staggered off towards base, the kite sliding all over the sky.

  Below cloud now, creeping away from London. Over open country, high enough to bale out. But no, I was set on bringing this back. Stubbornness, and some vanity. I thought to impress the few people who mattered to me – the CO, Tad, Dusty, Coco and Paddy McNally, the shade of cheery Fred Tate and maybe above all the silent, unsmiling airframe mechanic Evans, who reminded me of my dad.