No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘Mr Milner has been telling me a lot of things that you need to know and that won’t bother you very much, Simon, once you know them.’

  Kenworthy sat down on the end of the bench with Elspeth between them. Milner hesitated to make a start.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about talking in front of my husband, Mr Milner. He does need to know and he is the most sympathetic of listeners.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m not fighting shy of telling him. I wish he had been around years ago, so I could have told him then. It’s starting again for the second time within a few minutes that I find a little embarrassing.’

  ‘You’ve no need to, Mr Milner. Really, you’ve no need to be embarrassed.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. Silly of me.’

  Milner made himself begin, talking rather fast at first as he played his way into his story.

  ‘It was in the war. Early 1941. Only a matter of months—not all that many weeks—before these people were forcibly turned out of Yarrow Cross. I was a Flight-Sergeant air-gunner at the time: Tail-end Charlie, to give me all my proper dues.’

  Arse-end Charlie, Kenworthy thought. But it was the hallmark of Milner not to use that sort of talk in front of a woman.

  ‘It was quite a legendary role, wasn’t it, that of airgunner? Especially a rear gunner, because he was a long way out behind. I don’t know whether statistics did prove that air-gunners had a lower expectation than any other form of animal life in the clouds. I think it was the usual manner of our going that used to impress people. Sometimes, Tail-end Charlie was the only one who bought it; and sometimes his mates didn’t know for certain till they’d landed whether he’d bought it or not. He was all on his own: and the inter-com was brewed up even more often than the bloke in the turret.

  ‘I know this sounds like a long preamble, but I must ask you to put up with it. It’s the only way to give you the real flavour of it. We chaps, you know, we didn’t get blasé, even if we tried to make it look that way. And it didn’t get better with experience: it got worse. I had half my turret shot away once—the perspex, that is. I could feel the slip-stream pulling me out. I wrapped my legs round the gun-base till I’d practically tied knots in myself. And one phrase only kept wandering round my brain: “Milner, if you let go of that gun, you’ve had it”.’

  A saltier expression, of course; but not with a lady present.

  ‘I never had a direct hit. Only ricochets.’ He put his hand to his cheek with a mournful grin. ‘I seem prone to catch flying chips. But it wasn’t the things that hit you that were the trouble. It was the ones you were expecting. And it wasn’t just what was happening in and round your turret: it was what you could hear and imagine happening to the rest of the kite. Flak through the fuselage. A wallop on the wing, and you wondered if that was an elevator-flap gone. You could read a disaster into a change of engine-sound.’

  ‘I feel like that as a passenger on a Trident,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘And one night stands out. We’d taken a gash or two on our way to Germany, but it was the barrage over Holland on the way home that did the damage. We must have had three direct hits, and the navigator had already put one fire out. If it had happened before the bomb went, we shouldn’t be sitting here under these trees. We’d lost a starboard engine, too. And I was stuck back there, piecing it together from the sound-track. Bucketing and juddering. How much fuel had we lost? Remember I was travelling backwards, being dragged through an early dawn. It was rather like sitting astride a log that’s being pulled over loose boulders.

  ‘It was one of those gorgeous nights in late spring when it never gets wholly dark. The whole world, whether it was Nazi Europe or pastoral Norfolk, was held in a thin mist. It would clear in patches as soon as the sun began to make itself really felt.’

  The spot in which they were sitting was equally at odds with his narrative. A red squirrel, there are not many left in East Anglia, came scurrying down the trunk of a beech and scampered away across the grass.

  ‘I knew we were over the North Sea. I knew we’d lost height. I didn’t know how much. I couldn’t tell mist from water. Then suddenly we’d crossed the coast. I didn’t see the actual moment of it, but suddenly I saw a new kind of surf down there: not sea this time, the tops of trees. Fresh green, breaking buds, only it still wasn’t quite light enough to get the full colour of it, and the mist was still coming up in pillars. All I knew was those trees were too damned near. I could feel the struggle going on up front, Barney Fitzgerald and Alan Lucken, hauling with main force on the control column, trying to lift us with sheer physical strength bursting out of their chests.

  ‘But lift us was the one thing they couldn’t do. We bumped up once, on a thermal, but we were down the next second. You know what an air-pocket does to you? One sudden lift-shaft drop of fifty feet would ground and splinter us, chuck bits of spar and fabric over a half-mile radius. Something slapped against the perspex, only it wasn’t shrapnel this time. It was a twig. It could have been enough to tip us off what axis we had left. We were lucky that time: next time it might not be a handful of leaves.’

  The squirrel picked up a morsel of last year’s mast, examined it and threw it scornfully to one side.

  ‘I didn’t want to die, by God, I didn’t want to die. That was a lovely dawn. I wanted to see others like it.

  ‘It was better for them up front. They could see what was happening. They were still trying to do something about it.

  ‘I tried to school myself to it. I just wasn’t ready for it. Would I know anything about it when it happened? They weren’t just prayers I said: I was trying to get hold of God himself.

  ‘Then suddenly we’d cleared the trees. It was the edge of Yarrow Cross, slightly askew. And I was looking down on a receding cottage, not ten feet to spare, if that. And there was a girl in an upstairs window, sitting out on the sill, her hair long and wild, her breasts barely covered by her nightdress. She wasn’t expecting visitors, was she, at that time in the morning? Especially not from the sky.

  ‘She’d be sixteen or seventeen, I supposed, a woman already—unspoiled.’

  He smiled expectantly at Simon and Elspeth. ‘People don’t talk like that any more, do they? Well, I’m going to say quite a few other things that don’t belong to the 1970s. She looked up at me, and she waved, and I waved back. And, I make no bones about it, I bloody well cried. I remember nearly taking the skin off my eyes on the back of my flying-glove.’

  His eyes were beginning to smart again as he told it; you could see that.

  ‘I’ll be honestly sentimental—she meant life to me, my life. She meant England. And that isn’t contemporary talk, either, is it? Then she was gone. I don’t know what speed we were down to, but I can’t have been looking down at her for more than a few seconds. Then …’

  He smiled with a conscious sense of anti-climax. ‘The village was sweeping backwards under us. I could see cottage gardens, ramshackle home-made sheds, bean-poles with nothing growing up them yet. I saw the big house, across its little park, columns of mist like giant men in front of those square windows. And then—I’ve never been so near to the face of a church clock in my life. Seventeen minutes to five, those hands stood at. I remember desperately trying to work out whether it had stopped or not. I still don’t know.

  ‘We were away from Yarrow Cross in no time, back over trees again. But somehow I wasn’t so scared. I knew Barney and Alan would have a shot at putting us down on the first bit of flat they saw. And nine or ten minutes later, they did. I was concussed. When I came to, I was still looking at that girl in the window. Only she turned out to be a nurse saying “Hullo” as if she’d met me on a date by the station guardroom. They kept me in there a week or more. I was the only one of the crew to survive, which is why I’m a bit weak on some of the supporting detail.’

  Something disturbed the squirrel. It ran helter-skelter to the nearest tree, shot up the trunk along a branch, leaped a gap across into a sycamore.

  ‘So you came bac
k to Yarrow Cross at your first opportunity?’

  ‘First opportunity? When they let me out of that hospital, I went straight home. And then they posted me. When I first came back to Yarrow Cross, the roofs were off and the barbed wire was up.’

  ‘What had you hoped to find? Her?’

  ‘I knew I wouldn’t. It was all of five years. I don’t know. I just felt I had to see the place again, and was fined five quid for my pains. Do you think they’d have let me off with a caution if I’d told them I was chasing the image of a hand-wave?’

  ‘It would have paid off,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘I can see that now. But you weren’t there, Mr Kenworthy. And your good lady wife wasn’t there. And it was all so … so public. It would have ruined my own memory, wouldn’t it? And they seemed to think I was on the brink of some sort of sedition.’

  Kenworthy answered him very quietly. ‘You can’t blame them for wondering.’

  ‘Well, of course …’

  ‘Not of course in theory, Mr Milner, of course in fact. And that’s what they’re thinking now.’

  Milner laughed, a short, unheartfelt chuckle. There was no optimism in it: it came from whatever drugs they had been feeding him.

  ‘Absurd as it is …’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it absurd. Or, at least, I think you should see it from the point of view of a group of by no means antagonistic policemen, well meaning, sympathetic souls, who ask no more than occasionally to see something go right for somebody.’ God, he felt hypocritical; was he just playing up to Elspeth?

  ‘By no means antagonistic …’ Milner started.

  ‘Yes, I know, Milner, don’t say it. Just don’t say it. We can’t just go to our superiors and say, “All right. It’s absurd. I feel it in my bones. Close the file on my say-so.” The men we know are being watched by men we don’t know.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘In that case …’ Kenworthy knew he had to do it; it was difficult in front of Elspeth. ‘In that case, Milner, I suggest you tell us why you’re really so anxious to keep going back to that damned heath.’

  He’d tried to do it without that chop of hardness in his voice, had changed his mind in mid-sentence; realised he’d foozled it by any standard of interrogation.

  But Milner certainly looked as if he got the message.

  And Elspeth was too disciplined to let her facial expression change. It would be inexact to say that the smile froze on her face. The smile remained; she was urgently struggling still to give Milner confidence; but at the same time, she was as shaken by the change in Simon’s tone as Milner was. For an instant all emotional interchange hung fire. For a moment Milner looked as if he were about to speak; his lips moved slightly, then no words came.

  ‘Because, Milner, there is another reason. And I’ve no doubt it is as innocuous and innocent as the one you’ve just given us.’

  Milner’s mouth moved again. ‘As a matter of fact …’

  But at that moment bodies came through the trees, crepe soles on the resilient turf, spring grasses brushing against the turn-ups of trousers. It was Menschel, accompanied by a male nurse in a white coat: a deceptively smiling man, with freckles, broad shoulders and a familiarity with hysterics.

  ‘That’ll have to do, Mr Kenworthy. Time for your medicine, Edward.’

  The attendant had a medicine-cup containing small white pills, concealed like a conjuror in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Tomorrow, perhaps?’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘I’ll make no promises. One long talk, such as you’ve just had, yes. But it takes longer to forget than to remember. Another three or four days, perhaps.’

  ‘But …’ Milner said.

  ‘Now, Edward, you know what I told you: don’t let them make you think it matters. Sorry, Mr Kenworthy, he has had enough.’

  They led Milner away, up a bank between blossoming variegated brooms. And when they reached the car, Kenworthy let Elspeth tell the story to Derek.

  Derek held them poised on the white line of a round-about, fell in behind a mobile cement-mixer, and spoke again after he had pulled them out into their road home. ‘And it’s good enough for you?’

  The question was addressed to Kenworthy.

  ‘I do believe him.’

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ Derek said.

  ‘There are plenty of objections. It would be as well to run over them.’

  ‘What speed could a plane like that drop to and still remain airborne? Eighty-five? I’m only guessing. I’m absolutely clueless on the point. But too damned fast, anyway, for human features to register. Especially a face that suddenly appears after an eternity of tree-tops and clouds.’

  Derek suddenly put his foot down. The road ahead was clear. Some two hundred yards ahead of them a woman was pushing a pram. They passed her with the needle on a tremulous and dutiful seventy.

  ‘We were looking for her and at her, and approaching her head on. What can you remember?’

  ‘Not relevant,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘But I say it’s very relevant, Milner wouldn’t have had time.’

  ‘There was time for a wave of the hand by either party. That’s all he claims. We could have waved to her and she to us.’

  ‘And come back this way to date her up, thirty years later?’

  ‘The Greeks, as usual,’ Kenworthy said, ‘can help us linguistically.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nympholepsis.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t the benefits of an education in Met.’

  ‘A state of euphoria, brought about in pale-faced loiterers by accidentally coming upon a woodland goddess. It happened every other day in the groves of Mount Olympus.’

  ‘Do you think they know that in the Home Office? It’ll look good in a “case closed” report, won’t it? I rather fancy it. Nympholepsis. No further action recommended. Signed, D. Stammers, D.C.I. I must say, it suits dear old Milner, though. Alone and palely loitering.’

  ‘The sedge is withered by the lake,’ Elspeth said.

  ‘You haven’t actually met my Chief Constable, have you, Simon?’

  ‘It might help, of course, if you could produce the girl.’

  ‘Oh, yes, where were you at 4.43 on the morning of 23rd April, 1941, and to whom did you wave your hand?’

  ‘She might remember,’ Kenworthy insisted amicably. ‘I mean, God knows why she was sitting half in, half out of her bedroom window at that time of night or day. But if a bomber had come suddenly lumbering out of the trees, not ten feet above her … well, it would make its mark, wouldn’t it? And we could perhaps find her. Damn it, I’ve pulled off longer shots than that in my time. We know who lived in each house, don’t we? We can see which houses faced west by south-west. That will narrow things down.’

  After some moments, Derek spoke. ‘This is going to have its amusing moments, you know. I shall be sent for to supplement this report. So he waved to her, Stammers, and thirty years later she’s come forward to remember waving back at him. Well, not exactly come forward, sir. My brother-in-law suggested … And you feel that this is conclusive, do you, Stammers?‘

  ‘Is that all that matters to you?’ Elspeth asked. ‘A credibility rating?’

  Neither man directly answered her.

  ‘It isn’t exactly conclusive,’ Kenworthy said. ‘But we’d better have a shot at finding her, anyway. It will help. And I think it might lead us on to other things. I mean, there’s more to it than just nympholepsis. Nothing that anybody’s going to gaol for, I’ll be bound. But if that charmer Menschel had come a couple of minutes later …’

  Stammers suddenly changed down, switched on his nearside flasher, and filtered into a country lane. ‘We’ll find her,’ he said, with no consciousness of melodrama.

  Chapter Seven

  For three quarters of a mile they fretted behind a tractor drawing a muddy empty trailer.

  ‘Shot in the dark, this one, Simon. But I’ve others in the armoury if this fails. I wish we lived a
little nearer Wiltshire.’

  At last the driver of the tractor put out an arm, pulled up obliquely across the road, and got off his seat to unfasten a gate.

  ‘I don’t even know if she’s still alive, the woman I’m taking us to see. Except that her existence is too charmed for her ever to die. And not the healthiest of charmers at that. You’ll see—perhaps.’

  The trailer bumped across the verge into a field, and Stammers raised a finger in friendly acknowledgement. The gesture seemed to confirm that this really was his country.

  ‘Emma Pascoe, the woman we are calling on. If she’s still alive, she’ll be turned ninety. She left Yarrow Cross, of course, when the rest of them did. No husband, ever, reared a boy of her own, and then three grand-sons, real tearaways, when their parents died. That’s how I come to know her so well: the Pascoe kids. Sam, Tom and Darkie. Every crime in the calendar: gas-meters, church poor boxes, breaking into cricket pavilions. Big stuff. Big enough to scare half the county, anyway. And it wasn’t just that they knew how to handle themselves. They didn’t know when not to. I’ve known Darkie get himself eighteen months for resisting arrest on a charge that would only have got him six.

  ‘But Emma knew how to deal with them—and me. She’s only a little woman, and those three were six-footers, but when she said turn, they turned. I wasn’t exactly the apple of her eye when I was a detective-sergeant, but she’d known for years, without ever liking it, which side her bread was buttered.

  ‘“Which of them is it you’re after this time?” she’d ask, and I’d tell her. And in my younger days, I’d still take the trouble to explain to her what it was all about. But she hardly ever listened. She wasn’t interested. I don’t think she believed me. She was a wicked bitch in her own right, but she was also a realist. She played along when tactics demanded it. “Is it Darkie again?” she’d ask, she always did have a soft spot for Darkie—he was the wildest and dimmest of the bunch.

  ‘“Afraid so, Ma,” I’d say, and “I’ll tell him when he comes in,” she’d croak. “He’ll be round. You can depend on it.” And I could. While the D.I. was still wondering whether he ought to issue firearms to make this arrest, Darkie would shuffle shame-faced into the station, start emptying his pockets on to the counter before we’d even told him what it was about. She had those three where she wanted them.’