Nor the Years Condemn

by Justin Sheedy

‘Keep it down, will ya?’ Eastwood chuckled. ‘Don’t wanna alert the Luftwaffe now, do we… Oh, and it gets better.’

  ‘Not better than that, it doesn’t…’

  ‘You’re testing them for us. Combat testing, that is. You and Carroll.’

  ‘What? Testing them where?’ Only then did Quinn process Eastwood’s words. ‘ Combat testing?’

  ‘Anywhere you like. It’s your neck on the line, you call the shots… Though I thought you just might like to take them for a stooge over a little place called Maupertus-sur-Mer.’

  ‘But, Bob…’

  ‘What? I’m busy…’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You’re my best.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You heard me. Look, we wanna see what the Mark IX can do. When in harm’s way. Obviously we want it brought back so we can be told what happened. And I judge you the most likely person on the squadron to get there and make it back. It’s best for the squadron. Oh, and you’re taking Leave before you go. Twenty-four hours.’

  *

  Walking towards Australia House from the Strand Palace, Quinn thought of the restaurant he and Victoria had been to.

  He’d forgotten its name.

  He must have passed it already; Australia House just ahead.

  Reaching his destination’s main entrance, he paused for a moment by the stone pillar as a bunch of RAAF boys went noisily in ahead of him. After they’d passed, Quinn realised he’d halted.

  Simpsons.

  It had come back to him.

  Only with it flooded everything else from that night: her face across the table from him, her eyes, her laughter, later, her body intertwined with his, her arms, her legs, her hips…

  His insides clawed.

  She was gone.

  He stared.

  Stared between the meaningless shapes of the morning all around him.

  Until they were pillars of stone.

  A sidewalk.

  Traffic.

  Passers-by once again.

  He drew in a heavy breath.

  Let it out…

  And kept on walking.

  *

  He’d walked for blocks, hardly thinking, just walking, from cross-street to cross-street the bombed-out sites becoming more and more frequent, the people less and less. Most vehicles had followed detour signs way back, a soul shuffling along here and there, one pushing a child’s pram filled with what looked like rags.

  By the time he was nearing St Paul’s Cathedral, the city’s bomb damage had grown to desolation. With the dome looming, he realised he was walking down a canyon of ruins, on each side of him windows framing only grey sky – skeletons of buildings where once people had lived, worked? Impossible to tell. Rounding a corner of high empty walls, ahead of him lay a city block.

  Completely flattened.

  Around its vast perimeter was a frayed pale red ribbon on sticks, fallen down in places.

  Quinn looked out across the plain of rubble. About a hundred feet across it, he thought he caught sight of some small animal. Until it stood, and he saw the tattered cap – a small boy, dwarfed against the backdrop of the cathedral dome.

  Quinn lit a cigarette. And trod carefully out over the broken bricks and masonry towards the child.

  Still with around fifty feet to go and almost losing his footing over the foundation of a shattered wall, Quinn dropped his cigarette and called out.

  ‘You alright, son?’

  A tiny face glanced up like a squirrel on its guard, only to turn slowly back away. No answer came.

  Quinn continued towards the boy and, drawing closer, saw he was digging in the rubble at his knees. ‘Are you alright there, mate?’

  The digging continued.

  Drawing up to the child, Quinn saw his face was dirty, hair matted.

  ‘Yes…’ the child said.

  Quinn noticed a toy to one side – a tin model car of some kind, its green paint chipped and faded. ‘Having a game, are we?’ Quinn put his age at about five, just a bit younger than Angie, at least, the last time he’d seen her. Yet the child at Quinn’s feet had an air wholly unlike his little sister – one of complete detachment… As if Quinn wasn’t even there.

  ‘No,’ came the answer finally. ‘…I find things sometimes.’

  Quinn paused before asking. ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘My toys.’

  Quinn saw the model car was rusted. ‘Well,’ he smiled cheerfully, ‘maybe you shouldn’t leave them out in the rain, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Quinn remembered it was a Monday. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’

  The child didn’t answer.

  ‘Do your parents know you’re here?’

  The child seemed to have to think about this.

  ‘I suppose so.’ He kept digging. ‘…The lady at the shelter said you can see everything from Heaven.’

  Quinn paused again. ‘…I’m sorry, mate.’

  The child extracted another sad little object from the rubble.

  ‘I used to cry… When I was four. But I don’t anymore.’

  ‘Do you live near here?’

  ‘…I used to.’

  Quinn scanned the area – not a soul in sight, no sign of inhabited dwelling. ‘Do you have any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you could tell me where they are?’

  ‘…Wiv my mum and dad.’

  Quinn shook his head minutely. Jesus. Poor little thing.

  He wished to his core there was something he could do, something to help the kid but what? Give him some money? Quinn realised he’d none on him – hadn’t stopped at Australia House to draw any. A thought struck him and he fished in his tunic breast pocket. No sooner had he handed the chocolate bar down to the boy than he’d snatched it, ripped the paper open and was devouring it hungrily. As he did so, for the first time since Quinn’s arrival, he cast furtive glances upwards.

  After several eager mouthfuls, the child spoke with chocolate teeth. ‘Are you a soldier?’

  ‘…Yes.’

  ‘Have you killed many people?’

  Quinn considered his total. So far, three fighters, two bombers… So nine men. He couldn’t be sure precisely. ‘…A few.’

  The child simply kept munching.

  Then it came to Quinn: He’d quietly report the kid’s plight to someone at Australia House. Better still, he’d put a notice up on the board at the Boomerang Club: Maybe some of the blokes’d pop by now and then, bring him this and that. In fact, the more Quinn thought about it, it sounded like an idea that just might catch on at the Boomerang Club. It was something anyway. He couldn’t think what else – He was back on ops tomorrow, and a special op no less.

  He considered the boy a final time, and moved to go. ‘Well. You look after yourself, little mate.’

  There came only more munching, and a vacant stare.

  Quinn started to make his way back across the rubble, already considering what best to write for the club noticeboard, when, nearing the perimeter ribbon, he fairly stumbled on a plank of old wood. Dusting himself off, he noticed a sign at the end of the plank, his misstep having unearthed it from shattered bricks. Out of frustration more than anything, he flipped it over with his shoe.

  RESTRICTED AREA. DANGER OF UNEXPLODED BOMBS.

  BY ORDER. A.R.P. DEPT. HOME OFFICE. 1940.

  Quinn spun around back to the child.

  No Way… If I’m gonna get blown to bits let it be doing what I joined up for, not for some kid I never met playing with Death every day for two years already – Not on your Life.

  Quinn knocked off his cap and started determinedly back out over the broken stone.

  In his next moments, his mouth went completely dry – Maybe the kid had survived this long due to body-weight alone! Quinn knew his every next step could bring the blinding flash of an explosion he’d never hear. No. No sound. Only a pounding between his ears – his own heartbeat. Drawing ever closer to the
child, he felt a droplet of sweat trickle down his brow. It plopped off his nose and landed on a mortar dust-covered brick by the child as Quinn hooked an arm down, scooped the child up by the waist, spun and reversed in a single motion.

  On the way back across the ruined ground, Quinn became aware of another sound: Under his arm, the boy was howling – something about his home.

  Quinn said nothing, to close the distance between them and the perimeter ribbon his only goal.

  Reaching it, he slung the kid down on his feet to face him, gripping his shoulders as he bawled with tears.

  ‘ You must never go back in there! Never! Don’t you know you could get killed?!’

  Slipping Quinn’s grasp, the child was gone, his sobs echoing back off blasted walls. As they faded, Quinn bent slowly forward.

  Placed a hand on each knee.

  Vomited.

  Spat.

  And spat again.

  *

  A new system had been developed at Cogers Inn.

  The place was now so squeezed with young Australians, mostly Wireless Op/Air Gunners, Quinn observed, that the majority never made it to the bar. Pints of beer were simply passed over heads in perpetual relay to and from it. Quinn could see in their faces they were mostly new blokes, Sergeants mainly, and all looked under the drinking age.

  Having washed, rested and re-uniformed back at the Strand Palace, he sipped his beer, same corner of Cogers as last time, and rehearsed tomorrow in his mind…

  He’d been through it briefly with Eastwood before leaving Hornchurch, Carroll would be ready: Take-off 1600 Hours, fly west, destination, RAF Boscombe Down, near Salisbury Plain. Top-up fuel, take-off again 1800, fly south, over Bournemouth, and out over the Channel. Directly south across it lay the Cherbourg Peninsula. A decent landmark for them there would be the imposing Napoleonic era fort on the coast at the Pointe de Nacqueville, now used by the Germans. A few miles to the left of that was the coastal town of Querqueville, then the Luftwaffe aerodrome of Maupertus-sur-Mer. Beyond that was the German U-Boat base at Cherbourg – bad news. They shouldn’t go too near the coast at all in fact, certainly not over it – suicide given the area’s heavy anti-aircraft defences. Don’t come back with holes in my new aircraft, Eastwood had smiled grimly. I’d stay a couple of miles out to sea, if I were you… They’ll probably send some fighters up to try and intercept you, if you’re lucky you’ll catch one coming in to land. If you do, kill him. Carroll to observe, and protect your Six. Then you run like hell…

  ‘Hello,’ said a soft English voice.

  Quinn looked up from his beer. It was a young Waaf.

  ‘I was wondering if I could borrow your light.’

  By the single thick band on her tunic cuffs, he saw she was a Section Officer. ‘My pleasure, ma’am.’ He lit her cigarette.

  ‘Thank you. And you don’t have to call me “ma’am”; we’re the same rank,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Jillian will do.’

  Her hair was brunette, straight, not in the rolls that seemed the fashion, it hung in what Quinn had heard called a ‘bob’. Beneath a pinned-back fringe, her eyebrows were very thin, and gave her face a quiet severity.

  Also a strange familiarity.

  ‘Have we met before?’ he asked.

  She was petite, and though her face wasn’t conventionally pretty, there was an elegance about it.

  ‘Sort of. I took the notes for your panel at Hornchurch. …For Timmins.’

  ‘Oh yes, the… kid from 154… You were at the party too, weren’t you? I’m Daniel Quinn.’

  ‘Jillian Brown.’

  She extended her hand. They shook. And chatted over their drinks.

  She’d grown up in the London suburbs, somewhere named Notting Hill, though had been on a scholarship to Cambridge when she’d joined up. Reading Mathematics. Quinn asked her what she was up to now.

  ‘Oh, this and that. I look at reconnaissance photos, mainly. Photos from over there.’ Faint sarcasm in her voice now, ‘They call it Intelligence…’

  He grinned. ‘Intelligence? You’re not a spy, are you?’

  ‘Damn, did I say I worked in Intelligence?’ She grinned back. ‘Yes, I’ve been sent to tail you, obviously… Bogart’s working behind the bar tonight, Basil Rathbone and Robert Donat are collecting glasses.’

  They laughed, Quinn relieved for the interaction with another person. Her job was in Photographic Reconnaissance Interpretation: daily analysis of photographs taken every morning by ‘PR’ Spitfires and Mosquitos over occupied France – the Germans did the same thing over England, she said. Beyond that, ‘ security’, a conversation-changer Quinn was by now well used to. She asked him about Australia, his background, family. They even found something directly in common: a favourite song of the moment as Duke Ellington’s Don’t Get Around Much Anymore wafted over Cogers’ speakers.

  ‘Would you like another drink, Daniel?’

  The question gave him pause. ‘Look, I’d love one, and to keep talking with you… But I’d better not. I need an early night. I’ve a…’ he stopped himself, ‘a few things to think about for tomorrow.’

  She considered his face carefully. ‘…Yes, I’m sure you do.’

  They bid each other goodnight, Quinn making his way back across the crowded pub.

  As he reached the middle of the room toward the entranceway, she drew her eyes off his back, and nodded to a Wireless Op/Air Gunner by the door.

  Who looked towards Quinn as he passed.

  And exited Cogers behind him.

  *

  In the Spitfire IX, Quinn felt he was truly flying. With its Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine, he had 1565 horse-power at his command, 95 more powerful than the Mark V, top speed, 408 miles per hour. Its second air intake under the wings stopped the engine melting off. On paper, it seemed no massive improvement over the Mark V. Yet in the air, the performance gap between life and death had been closed: The Focke-Wulf’s advantage was gone. O’Regan had been right about it, the new supercharger made the difference: On their way over London, Quinn had taken them all the way up to 40-thousand to find the IX sprinted at any height.

  Landing at Boscombe Down, they refuelled, and took off again on schedule. Quinn heard Carroll’s voice in the headphones immediately after wheels-up.

  ‘Look up ahead to your left.’

  Rapidly approaching was a grass hill by the edge of a forest. Quinn saw there were bold white shapes marking it. As he dipped a wing slightly to get a better view, the shapes flashed past to the left, letters – A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A – gone as quickly as they’d loomed. Carroll’s voice came through the headphones again.

  ‘See. You chaps’ve been here before.’

  As they’d refuelled, Carroll had told Quinn all about the carving, and others like it in the area, dug in 1916 by young Aussies camped nearby while awaiting embarkation to France and the trenches. Into the white chalk just beneath the turf, they’d sculpted an outline of their home continent, about half a football field in size, the enormous letters within it.

  Now sitting on 300 miles per hour, Quinn calculated they’d eat up the 35 miles to the coast in around 7 minutes, smoothly combing each rise and fall of the countryside that swept beneath, skirting villages at steeple height. Until straight ahead lay the English Channel, and Quinn’s exhilaration from the ride was pricked by fear. But that, he well knew, would give him an edge. As the beaches whipped under, he thought he glimpsed Bournemouth far out to the right, ahead, only ocean, slate grey.

  As the Channel carpeted swiftly below, Quinn remembered Eastwood’s words. The Mark IX, he’d assured, was a match for the Focke-Wulf in every respect, in some, its superior. This had been known as far back as June, he’d explained, from comparison flight tests up against a captured Focke-Wulf. How on earth the poor German pilot had landed his aircraft at a British aerodrome had been just as bewildering to him as to the RAF personnel who took him prisoner. For his titanic blunder, one suggested the young German be awarded the DFC, having handed the test pilots an
d boffins of RAF Boscombe Down their best intelligence coup of the war so far.

  This day, Quinn hoped he’d find his own Focke-Wulf. Carroll closely off to his right, Quinn kept them flying as low above the wave-tops as he dared. Flecks of spray hitting his windscreen now and then, he knew at this height German radar would be blind to them.

  Fifteen minutes hadn’t elapsed since leaving the English coast when, up ahead, the line of the horizon became something darker than ocean. Quinn squinted hard to extend his focus. Yes – the coastline of the Cherbourg Peninsula, just visible, but thickening.

  As they’d soon be in visible range of German ground defences, being below their radar now no longer mattered. Quinn pushed forward a touch on the throttle, and pulled back slightly on the stick, altimeter needle winding up. Reaching five thousand in just over a minute, he levelled them out, and throttled back. Surely enough, out ahead below them in the late afternoon sun it all stretched: the distinctive polygon shape of the old fortress – must be Nacqueville, then another town – Querqueville, then an airfield. Quinn put his goggles down.

  Maupertus-sur-Mer.

  ‘THERE! 12 o’clock level. About two miles.’

  Carroll’s voice was resolute in the headphones. Quinn searched ahead through the clouds now whipping past them.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘He’s alone.’

  ‘What’s his heading?’

  ‘Same course as us, Dan.’

  ‘Sure it’s not a Friendly?’

  ‘Focke-Wulf. Definite.’

  Quinn pushed the throttle to the gate. Carroll didn’t have to be told.

  In a subtle dive, Quinn saw his airspeed indicator creep towards 400, then saw the speck, about a mile in front, and slightly above.

  The speck grew wings. And began to take on a shape Quinn knew very well, that neat, angular symmetry, all tips smoothed and rounded. Carroll had been spot-on.

  At less than a hundred yards and closing fast, Quinn unleashed his twin cannon – on target. Under their rate of fire of twenty fat shells a second, the Focke-Wulf was already doomed. After a burst of several seconds, Quinn drew up close behind it and, to his amazement, saw the pilot still alive somehow, standing up in what was left of his cockpit and scrambling to jump. He saw the man’s face and its startled expression.