Under a Wartime Sky

by Liz Trenow

  ‘Adam Merriweather? Is it you?’ As he turned, she saw the terrible red, distorted skin on the other side of his face and the bald patch over half of his skull. Burn scars.

  ‘It’s me – Kath Motts. From those revision classes, remember?’ It was only as she approached that she noticed the thin white stick in his hand. Burned and blinded, too.

  ‘Of course I remember.’ Adam gave a lopsided smile. ‘Sorry, everything’s a bit of a blur these days.’

  ‘Heavens, Adam, whatever happened?’ She sat beside him on the bench.

  ‘I joined up. Conscripted. No choice.’

  ‘Surely you were too young?’

  ‘I was nineteen,’ he said, simply. ‘And anyway, I wanted to do something useful. My brother was out there already, and there’s nothing much left for me at home, so it seemed the logical thing to do.’

  ‘How did you get these . . .?’ She gestured to the scars before remembering he couldn’t see her hands.

  ‘Bomb. On the beach at Dunkirk. We were trying to shelter in an old fishing boat, but they bombed it and it caught fire. Still, I’m lucky to be alive. Most of the others didn’t survive.’

  ‘How on earth did you get home?’

  He gave a half laugh, a sort of snort. ‘Bloody irony is that if I hadn’t been burned, I probably wouldn’t have made it out of there at all. They were taking the injured first, so they hauled me across the sand and plonked me on the deck of a trawler. I was howling, of course, but they carried on dousing me in sea water the whole way home and that’s probably what kept me alive, the docs said.’

  Kath chewed a nail, wondering how you could possibly return to normal life after an experience like that, and so terribly maimed. ‘Is there anything I can do, Adam?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Just don’t feel pity for me. It hurts too much. I’m trying to learn Braille so I can carry on with my studies. There’s a lovely lady in the library who’s helping me.’

  ‘Would you like to come back for a cup of tea? I think there’s cake.’

  That crooked smile again. ‘That would be lovely, Kath. Thank you.’

  She called at his house a week later to be greeted by a bleary-eyed man – his father, she assumed – who was plainly drunk.

  ‘Could I speak to Adam?’ she asked, reeling from his breath.

  ‘Gone,’ the man slurred. ‘Rehabili-whatsit.’

  ‘Rehabilitation?’

  ‘Tha’s the one.’

  ‘When do you expect him home?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe never, poor old lad.’

  ‘Please tell him I called, could you, when you see him next?’

  ‘Will do, missy.’

  She never saw Adam again.

  Londoners who had been evacuated to the town just after the declaration of war were told they should go home, now that the threat of an imminent German invasion meant Felixstowe was no longer a ‘safe area’. The young woman and her baby billeted in Mark’s old room went with them. Although they didn’t miss the baby’s night-time crying, everyone was sorry to see her go.

  Then on one fine June morning, as if to reinforce the point, a German plane broke through the air defences and flew over Bawdsey, dropping high-explosive bombs. Fortunately their aim was poor and the bombs fell harmlessly onto farmland. No one was hurt either in the village or at the Manor, which was still fully operational as an RAF base. But, Kath thought, what if she and Ma had been at work in the kitchens, and the bombers’ aim had been more accurate? They weren’t surprised to learn soon afterwards that all female staff, including the WAAFs, had been evacuated.

  Mark hadn’t been given leave for months now, and they knew he would be flying almost every day. What Churchill called the Battle of Britain was raging over the south coast, and the nightly bombing of London and other big cities followed. He declared that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. Mark was one of ‘the few’, Kath knew – and she also knew that the casualty rate was high. His occasional letters were brief but determinedly cheerful. Each day the family steeled themselves, fearing the arrival of the postman or the telegram boy and scouring the newspaper lists of casualties. ‘No news is good news’ became their morning mantra.

  Felixstowe began to feel like a ghost town. Notices were posted at the Town Hall declaring that all children and their mothers, as well as the ‘aged and infirm’, should leave the town for safer areas inland. Schools were closed, and by August just a few thousand residents were left. But the railways were vital for bringing in troops and supplies, so Pa was deemed an ‘essential worker’ and Ma simply refused to leave without him.

  ‘Whatever will we do if the Germans invade?’ Kath asked.

  ‘We’ll go to stay with Auntie Phyllis.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d welcome us with open arms.’

  ‘Don’t be so cheeky, young woman,’ Pa said.

  Kath recalled their last visit to her great-aunt’s dark little flat in Stowmarket, crowded with over-large furniture and dusty pot plants, and the way that Phyllis had fussed around them, adjusting the lace antimacassars that seemed designed to slip from the backs of the chairs. When the adults weren’t looking, Kath had taken a peek into the other rooms: the tiny old-fashioned kitchen, a bathroom with a rust-stained bath, a bedroom dominated by a large double bed and a further room she’d expected to be for Phyllis’s lady companion, but which seemed to be in use as a study.

  The WAAF leaflet sat on Kath’s bedside table. As her twentieth birthday approached, she raised the topic. It was a mistake. Ma went pale and slumped into a chair. ‘How could you even think of it, Kath?’

  ‘I need to do something.’

  ‘But I can’t lose both of my children.’

  ‘You haven’t lost one yet.’

  ‘You know the odds, for heaven’s sake.’

  Later Kath heard her weeping upstairs, being comforted by Pa. So for the moment she kept herself busy, volunteering for the Home Guard, issuing gas masks, helping with the evacuations, helping with civil defence tasks, evacuations and ‘digging for victory’ by turning the back garden into an allotment.

  With only one income, there was much drawing in of belts. There was little to spend their money on anyway, since many of the shops and all the seaside attractions had closed ‘for the duration’. There were even, it was rumoured, mines buried beneath the fabled golden sands where, just the previous year, children had made castles and tried to dig to Australia. Somehow it was this, above all else, that gave Kath sleepless nights. What has my beloved town come to, she asked herself?

  When Mark finally managed to come home for a few days he was clearly exhausted, but after sleeping for twelve hours he reappeared in a buoyant mood. Ma had been saving ration coupons for weeks, and laid on a feast.

  ‘We’ve got the bastards on the run,’ Mark declared, loading his plate. ‘We were massively outnumbered, but we’ve got them scared. A thousand German planes shot down in just a month, they’re saying.’

  ‘What’s your personal tally, son?’ Pa asked.

  Mark frowned and tapped his nose. ‘Not allowed to say, sorry.’

  ‘But if we were so outnumbered, how did we manage to see them off so successfully?’ Kath asked. ‘Are our planes that much better?’

  ‘C’mon, sis. It’s the skill of the pilots, of course.’

  ‘Another piece of pie, anyone? More carrots? They say they help to make your eyesight sharper,’ Ma said.

  ‘Puh,’ Mark snorted, holding out his plate. ‘That’s just propaganda, Ma.’

  ‘Carrots?’ Kath said, confused. ‘What on earth . . .?’

  ‘So the Germans don’t suspect the real reason for our success,’ he finished cheerfully. ‘It’s all a game of bluff and counter-bluff, this war.’

  ‘Some kind of game, when people are getting killed in their hundreds.’ Just as soon as she’d uttered the words she regretted them, lowering her gaze to avoid her mother’s furious glare.

&nb
sp; ‘What’s all this talk about some kind of magic eye in the planes?’ Pa asked. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘You don’t have to tell us, Mark,’ Ma said. ‘If it’s secret.’

  Mark leaned back in his chair, his cheeks flushing. ‘Is that what they’re saying? Well, Ma’s right, I can’t tell you anything, sorry. But just to reassure you, we do have some very clever bits of kit that the Germans don’t have. Or at least, theirs is not as clever as ours. Not yet, anyway.’

  Kath’s twentieth birthday was a low-key affair celebrated with fish and chips from the shop, wrapped in newspaper, followed by a few pints in the local with Joan and her boyfriend Sam as well as a couple of girls from school. All the talk was of the people they knew who were away fighting: Mark, Billy Bishop and all the boys from school who had already been conscripted. Kath told them about her meeting with Adam Merriweather and everyone agreed he’d had a tough life, with his mother’s death and then getting so horribly burned and losing his sight.

  ‘And all for what, you wonder?’ Kath said.

  ‘To stop the Germans?’ someone said, sarcastically.

  ‘I know that,’ she snapped back. ‘I meant, why are the Germans doing it?’

  ‘’Cos of the way they were treated after the last war, perhaps?’

  ‘They started that one too. Whatever can they expect?’

  The conversation rumbled on. Sam was the only boy in the group, and Kath wondered how he’d managed to avoid conscription. He was a tall lad, blond-haired, gangly and often hopelessly clumsy, as though his limbs had somehow outgrown the ability of his brain to control them. As a schoolboy he’d been painfully shy and never ‘one of the gang’. Quite what Joan saw in him Kath had never quite understood, until that evening.

  He seemed more at ease in his body these days. He spoke quietly but amusingly about his work at a large bakery in Ipswich, and he was generous with his money, buying two rounds of drinks in a row and refusing to let anyone else chip in.

  Talk turned to what they would do if the government, as was widely expected, extended the call-up to women. One girl wanted to work on farms, and the other was already training to be a nurse. Joan fancied being a driver – perhaps even an ambulance driver, even though it probably meant joining the ATS, enduring hours of square-bashing and having to wear unflattering khaki.

  ‘Isn’t it terribly dangerous, driving ambulances?’ Kath asked now.

  ‘Isn’t everything dangerous in war?’

  ‘What about you, Kath?’ one of the girls asked.

  ‘The WAAFs, of course. My brother’s in the RAF,’ she said. ‘Besides, that’s where all the good-looking men are.’

  ‘But they don’t take women pilots, do they?’ someone asked.

  ‘There are a few, Mark says, but there are plenty of other jobs women can do, like communications work.’

  ‘Communications? What’s that?’

  ‘How do you think all those planes know what to do, when to scramble, which direction to fly in?’ She stopped. Careless Talk Costs Lives, the posters shouted. Even mentioning in the most general terms what Mark had talked about could get him – and her – into trouble.

  ‘What about you, Sam?’ she asked, to change the subject. ‘Which service do you fancy?’

  Joan jumped in, a little defensively: ‘He’s exempted because he works in a bakery.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ he said quietly, pausing to study his nearly empty glass.

  ‘Go on, Sam. You’re with friends,’ someone prompted.

  ‘My parents are Quakers,’ he began at last. ‘And one of the most basic requirements of their – well, my – faith is to promote peace and oppose war. We believe there are other ways of settling disputes between people, and even countries.’

  ‘Didn’t Chamberlain and everyone try that already?’ Kath asked. ‘Do you really think we could persuade that madman to back off, just by having a cup of tea and a little talk?’

  Sam flushed. ‘I’m only telling you what we believe. So in the last war, my father registered as a conscientious objector, even though he knew he would be court-martialled and sent to prison. He ended up spending three years in gaol.’

  Kath held her tongue. Surely even gaol was better than dying in the trenches.

  ‘They were treated terribly, not allowed to speak to any of the other prisoners and given the worst rations. He nearly died,’ Joan added.

  ‘Even then, he always claimed he was fortunate because some of them were sent over to France and told that if they disobeyed orders they would be shot as deserters,’ Sam added.

  ‘You’re lucky, though, with your exemption,’ one of the other girls said.

  ‘I’m not so sure, to be honest. It just doesn’t seem right when all the other boys are out there, but my parents would probably disown me if I joined up. When I mentioned it, my father hit the roof and wouldn’t talk to me for days. Mum said he considered it disrespectful to the sacrifice he made for his faith.’

  ‘Poor Sam,’ Kath said, as she and Joan walked home together. ‘I had no idea. What do you think he’ll decide?’

  Joan said nothing, and when Kath looked up she realised her friend was close to tears.

  ‘Oh, cripes, I’m sorry I said anything,’ she said, feeling in her pockets for a clean handkerchief.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Joan sniffed, wiping her eyes. ‘We have to face it one way or another. He feels very strongly that he ought to fight because, as you said, talking was never going to stop Hitler. But they’re such a close family. It would break his heart if they really did carry out their threat to disown him.’

  ‘And what do you want him to do?’

  ‘I want . . .’ Joan stopped walking, and her words were swallowed up by another wave of tears. ‘Oh, sorry. I’m such a ninny.’

  ‘Take your time. I’m here to listen,’ Kath said.

  ‘It’s just that . . . I’ve never loved anyone but Sam, you know?’

  ‘I know.’ She put her arm around her friend, waiting for the sobs to subside.

  ‘Oh Lord, I hate myself for being so selfish, Kath. But what I really hope is that he’ll choose to stay as a baker rather than dying on some blessed battlefield. Is that so wrong?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Kath reassured her, thinking of Adam. But was it wrong? She couldn’t decide.

  They heard the planes just as they reached Joan’s house. There were no sirens, so they assumed they were friendly. But just as they were wishing each other goodnight, a series of enormous explosions seemed to shake the ground beneath their feet and within seconds the sky to the north lit up with a ghastly reddish-yellow glow.

  ‘Bombs!’ Kath shouted. ‘Bloody hell, it’s the Manor.’

  Another huge explosion.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go to the shelter?’ Joan gasped, as a couple of RAF fighters screamed overhead.

  Kath imagined her brother in his cockpit, racing to shoot down the enemy planes. It was unbearable not knowing what was happening. ‘I’m going to the ferry,’ she said impulsively. ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Joan cried, just as her father appeared on the doorstep.

  ‘Whatever are you doing out here, girls? It’s a raid, for God’s sake! Come to the shelter.’

  ‘We’re going to see . . .’ Kath said.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, miss,’ Joan’s father said. ‘Not you either, young Kathleen.’

  For a second she hesitated. ‘I think I’ll get off home, thanks.’

  ‘Run, then,’ he said.

  The streets were filled with pale, fearful faces peering up into the sky, but by now the planes had gone and the night was silent once more. Kath grabbed her bike and cycled as fast as she could down towards the glow lighting the sky to the north.

  Drinkers from the Ferry Boat Inn had already gathered to gawp at the conflagration on the other side. Even though she knew no one who worked at the Manor any more, Kath felt a powerful attachment to the place and would hav
e been devastated had it been hit. She could see now that the fires seemed to be well away from the main building, and the masts still seemed to be reaching into the sky. But what about the other buildings, and the people working there? And all the workshops in the stable block, and the vital pieces of equipment Vic and his fellow scientists had worked on so hard? This could be a major disaster.

  Charlie and several others climbed into the ferry and set off across the swirling river.

  ‘Where’s they off to, then?’ someone said.

  ‘To bring back any casualties, God bless ’em.’ Soon afterwards an ambulance arrived at the ferry, with its lights flashing and bell clanging, and Kath realised that bringing the injured across the river would be far quicker than taking them to hospital via the long winding road to Woodbridge. As if to prove the point, it was a further ten minutes till the fire engines arrived on the Bawdsey side.

  Before long the glow of the fires began to diminish. Charlie, arriving back on the ferry boat, announced that there had been no casualties and little serious damage. ‘Damn fool Krauts couldn’t hit a barn door,’ he said. ‘All them bombs just fell in the grass.’

  When Kath finally reached home it was well past midnight, but the lights were still on in the house. Her mother ran to her, clasping her in a tight embrace.

  ‘Thank God you’re safe,’ she said. ‘We went to Joan’s and she said you’d gone to the ferry.’

  ‘I had to see what was going on at the Manor. They said no one was hurt, thank heavens.’

  ‘But you gave us a real fright. Never, ever, do that again,’ Pa raged. ‘Why do you think we took all that trouble to build the shelter? To keep us safe.’ He was nearly shouting now. ‘Pray heaven it never happens again, but you must promise that if it does, you will come straight home.’

  Everyone was on edge after that. They were fearful, gloomy times. King George visited to inspect the troops at Landguard Fort, apparently to rally morale, but it did little to cheer the townsfolk.

  Kath volunteered as an air-raid warden, spending most nights in cold, damp shelters peering into the sky with binoculars or brewing endless cups of tea on an old camp stove in an attempt to keep warm. It was scary and boring all at the same time – she even began to long for a bit of excitement. In her first week she went down with a cold, which seemed to linger for weeks. She never felt properly well.