Bluebirds

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘I’m all right. It’s just this sore throat,’ she croaked. ‘It’ll go soon.’

  The Hampden was trundling noisily round the peri track.

  ‘Well, if it’s not better by tomorrow, mind you report sick. I don’t want to see you out here in this weather. You’ll go and make yourself really ill.’

  ‘All right.’

  She helped him lower the radiator, wondering how much longer she’d be able to keep going. Her throat hurt so much now that she could hardly swallow at all. Ginger looked at her anxiously.

  ‘You go and sit down in the ’ut for a while, love.’ He tucked her scarf higher round her neck. ‘Get yourself a bit warm. I’ll finish this off. NAAFI van’ll be round in a tick so you can ’ave a nice hot cuppa.’

  She went and sat on her toolbox in the hut, close to the coke stove and with her arms wrapped round her body. She felt dreadful. Worse than ever. If it went on like this she’d have to do like Ginger said. She couldn’t remember ever feeling ill like this in her life; she’d never had anything worse than a cold. Chiefy would probably think she was putting it on just to stay in the hut by the stove . . . After a while she went to peer out of the window. The visiting Hampden had parked close by and shut down its engines – Peggy eighteens, she remembered from the training course. She also remembered the instructor’s warning about the Pegasus engine’s nasty habit of suddenly kicking over and spinning a few revs after they’d been switched off.

  ‘NAAFI up!’ someone shouted outside.

  She saw the NAAFI van drive up and people started running towards it from all directions. You had to be quick off the mark if you didn’t want to be at the back of the queue. Ginger flung open the hut door.

  ‘Bung us your mug, sweet’eart. I’ll get yours for you. You stay there in the warm.’

  She watched him as he ran, a mug in each hand, in the direction of the van. The Hampden stood in his path and she saw him duck under its starboard wing, close to the engine nacelle, taking a short cut. Then, all of a sudden, his body arced high up into the air as the Pegasus kicked over without any warning and its propeller caught him. His head went one way, his limbs another and what was left of Ginger fell to the ground in a bloody, mangled mess. The enamel mugs rolled over and over across the concrete.

  Winnie ran out of the hut. She stood there with her hands to her cheeks and her mouth opened in a scream that went on and on and on. It was Chiefy who caught her in his arms and turned her face into his chest, away from the sight, and, as she slumped against him, picked her up and carried her away.

  The head floated above her, its eyes looking at her from behind a pair of hornrimmed spectacles. Like Ginger’s head it had no body. Winnie tried to speak to it but her throat seemed to have closed up completely. She was lying on a bed somewhere, she knew that. The room was dim and behind the floating head there was a green screen.

  Its mouth was moving now, making sounds that she could vaguely hear but not really understand. The head disappeared and then another head appeared, wearing a white cap. She made another great effort to speak.

  ‘Ginger . . . Ginger . . .’

  ‘It’s all right,’ the second head told her. ‘I’m here. Go to sleep.’

  Winnie drifted away.

  She was in the isolation hospital for a month, lying flat on her back and wavering deliriously between life and death. At last she turned towards life. She was not allowed any visitors but when she was feeling better a WAAF officer came to see her. She was plump and smiling, in a uniform that was too tight for her, and she sat on the end of Winnie’s bed, making the springs creak.

  ‘Well, you did give us a fright being so ill, dear. You’ve had diphtheria, you know. What a to-do! Everyone confined to camp in quarantine for three weeks. We were quite worried about you. Lots of people have been asking after you – you’re a very popular girl. How are you feeling now, then?’

  ‘Better, thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘Jolly good! That’s the spirit.’

  The officer didn’t mention Ginger at all. She just went on talking cheerfully.

  ‘Now, we’re giving you a month’s sick leave so you’ll be able to go home and convalesce and get into tip-top shape again.’

  Suffolk and home. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘And how would you feel if we arranged a transfer for you down south – somewhere in Suffolk, if possible, nearer your home? Would you like that?’

  ‘As a flight mech, ma’am?’

  ‘Rather! You’re much too good to lose, so I hear. Flight Sergeant McFarlane has been singing your praises no end.’

  Chiefy being so kind. Chiefy holding her tight in his arms and comforting her . . . Don’t think about Ginger. Not now. Not yet. Not until you can think about it without wanting to start screaming again and cry and cry for what had happened.

  Winnie said weakly: ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  She turned her head away and closed her eyes.

  Twenty

  THE FORDSON CHUGGED steadily across the ten-acre field, hauling the plough. As Winnie neared the headland on the far side, she stood up on the axle and looked back at the furrows left behind her. They were dead straight. She had marked the field carefully with sticks before starting, measuring forty paces in from the side at each end. If there was one thing Dad couldn’t abide it was crooked furrows for people to see over the hedge. And he still thought the horses could do it better. Prince and Smiler would follow straight to a handkerchief tied on the stick; only sometimes they’d ramble a bit in the way a tractor never would, so long as you drove it right. It was very bouncy going along and the iron seat was hard as anything but she’d tied an old sack filled with straw on top, like a cushion, to make it more comfortable.

  She’d done half of the field and the sun was high in the sky. Time to stop for a bite and a bit of a rest. She switched off the ignition and turned off the petrol tap and the engine petered to a stop. She climbed down and took her sandwich out of the tool box on the side, and sat down by the hedge to eat it. The rooks were cawing away loudly, fussing over their nests in the elms behind her, but otherwise it was peaceful and the sun felt warm. Hot almost. It was hard to remember how cold it had been in the winter. The hedges were all coming out and she could see the new leaves on the trees. She felt a lot better now. Stronger in every way. She could think of Ginger without crying. The trick was not to think about how he’d died but only to remember him alive . . . to blot out the nightmare completely, as though it had never happened. She wished she could have talked to Ken about Ginger. It would have been a comfort to hear him say in his quiet way: It wasn’t your fault, Winn. You couldn’t’ve known he’d go and do the very thing he’d warned you against. But Ken was in his grave in the churchyard and she would never hear his voice again. Mrs Jervis had sold the shop to someone else and gone to live with a sister somewhere in Sussex. Everything had changed.

  She ate some more of the cheese sandwich and squinted along the furrows, viewing them from a different angle. Dead straight. Dad grumbled even more these days. Mostly it was about the Ministry of Agriculture who kept telling him what to grow. They’d told him to plough up some of the pasture, too, and he’d been furious about that. But the truth was he was making quite a bit of money out of the war. Most of the farmers must be. The country needed all the food they could provide.

  When Dad wasn’t grumbling about the Ministry it was usually about the Americans – about the way they’d taken over good farmland for their airfields and chopped down so many trees and made a real mess of the countryside. And he grumbled all the time about how their ’planes frightened the animals and stopped them producing. And how they drove their lorries and jeeps about too fast and often on the wrong side of the road. And how they’d taken over the Pig and Whistle and were drinking it dry of whisky and beer. But he was making good money out of the Americans too, selling them bacon and chickens and eggs and butter. And they stood him plenty of drinks in the Pig and Whistle, so Gran said. Gran heard lots of s
tories about the Yanks, even though she never left the house.

  ‘Some o’ them’ve got black skins,’ she had told Winnie, nodding her head. ‘Black as coal, so I hear. They say as they’ve got tails too, though I don’ see as how they could have . . . couldn’ sit down, could they?’

  ‘Of course they haven’t got tails, Gran. They’d be just the same as us but with another colour skin. I saw some in a lorry an’ they didn’t look much different.’

  ‘Huh. Wonder if it comes off?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The black o’ course. When they wash.’

  Winnie had laughed. ‘It’s not like that black you’re always gettin’ on your face, sittin’ close to the fire all the time. You can’t wash it off, or I ’spect they would. I should think they’d sooner be white if they could be.’

  ‘I haard the white ones all be millionaires, thass what they say.’

  ‘Who says, Gran?’

  ‘Folks.’

  She would never say who had passed on the gossip, but people came to the back door all the time for eggs and milk, so there was never a shortage of informants.

  The peace was suddenly shattered by the noise of a big aircraft taking off. Winnie turned her head to see a bomber rising from the direction of the American Air Force base across the fields. Dad would fuss again about losing unborn lambs if the ewes took fright, but at least he hadn’t lost any of his land, not like poor Josh Stannard who’d lost most of his farm. She watched the big bomber climbing slowly upwards. It was a Flying Fortress. A Boeing B17. Four Wright engines, twelve hundred horsepower each. She’d learned all that from old Ebenezer Stannard who’d been allowed to stay in his cottage on the edge of the base and spent his hours watching the bombers come and go. Not as nice looking as the Lancaster. It was a lumpy sort of thing, bristling with guns; there was even a gun turret hanging down underneath. But then the Americans went on daylight ops, so they’d need them. As it passed over the field she could see the big white American star on its side and a coloured picture painted up near the nose that looked like it was of a girl in a bathing suit, and not much of one either. Most of their bombers had pictures on them like that. What would Ginger have made of it? He’d liked ’planes to be ’planes and not messed around with like they were toys. He’d warned her once about the Yanks. She’d discovered already that they were even worse than the RAF. One day, when she’d biked over to take a look at the new airfield, a jeep with four of them in it had passed her on the road and slowed down. They’d been such a nuisance that she’d had to stop. She’d stood on tiptoe to peer over the hedge and had seen how trees had been felled and other hedges rooted up. Where spring crops should have been growing was a sea of sticky brown mud, crossed by ribbons of grey concrete. The perimeter track ran along within fifty yards or so of where she was standing and she could just see the threshold of the main runway. Close by there was a concrete hardstand where men were working on a Flying Fortress. She had studied them unobserved for some time. They were dressed in grey-green overalls and wearing funny kinds of caps with the brims turned up. They chewed gum as they worked and when one of them shouted out to another she could hear the twangy way they talked – just like in the films. It was odd to hear it in real life.

  She followed the bomber with her gaze as it climbed away and flew out of sight, and then she stood up, brushing her hands free of crumbs. Time to get back to work again before Dad came to the gate and started yelling across at her.

  Nora Gibson came over one evening. She lived down the lane and had joined the Women’s Land Army. She came dressed up in her uniform, the brim of the brown hat pulled down over one eye and her big bosom looking bigger still in the tight green jersey. She followed Winnie out to the barn when she went to bottle-feed two orphan lambs, and sat on an upturned pail, watching her and talking all the while.

  ‘I’ve got a smashin’ new boyfriend, Winn. He’s a Yank. One of those up at the base. Rear gunner, he is. Mum takes in washin’ for some of them – that’s how I got to know him. You never saw such good-lookin’ blokes . . . like film stars, they are. And they’ve got such lovely manners and say such nice things to you. And they’ve got all this money . . .’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it, Nora?’

  Nora flicked a piece of straw from her breeches. ‘Well, it makes a difference. You can’t help likin’ it . . . least, I can’t. And they’re so generous with it. Buzz is always givin’ me chocolate and chewin’ gum, and he gives Mum tins of ham and fruit and things like that. Last time he gave me a lipstick. A lovely bright pink, it is, an’ my old one was all finished.’

  ‘That’s a funny name – Buzz.’

  ‘Short for Buster, or somethin’ like that. Lots of them have those sort of names – like Chuck ’n Hank ’n Tex. But they’re such fun, Winnie, you’ve no idea . . .’ Nora sighed. ‘Not like most of our boys – they’re so dull.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re dull,’ Winnie said. The smaller of the lambs had given up the effort of sucking. If she didn’t persuade it to keep going, it would soon give up on life too. She picked it up and held it close against her, coaxing the teat back into its mouth. It began again, but feebly.. ‘I think they’re just as good as the Americans. Better.’

  ‘You ever met a Yank, then?’

  ‘No, but I’ve seen them around. They make a lot of noise, seems to me, and look like they show off a lot too. Dad says they act like they’d already won the war for us when they’re in the pub. I don’t think I’d like them much.’

  ‘You can’t say that ’til you’ve met one – it’s not fair. You ought to come to one of their dances. I’ve never had such fun.’ Nora’s eyes were shining. ‘There was this wonderful band playin’ an’ you should see the way they dance.. They do what’s called jitterbuggin’. It’s fast as anythin’ an’ they throw the girls right over their shoulders. Buzz is teachin’ me.’

  The lamb was sucking a bit more strongly now and waggling its little tail. Winnie tilted the bottle carefully. ‘Doesn’t sound much fun to me, bein’ thrown around . . .’

  ‘Oh, Winnie, you’re so old-fashioned sometimes! It’s the new way people dance. Why don’t you come and see for yourself? There’s a dance on Saturday and I’m goin’. Come with me. They send one of their trucks over to the war memorial to pick us up, so we don’t have to worry about gettin’ there and back. The wolf wagon they call it,’ Nora giggled.

  ‘I don’t think so, thanks, Nora.’

  ‘You’re scared!’

  ‘No, I’m not. I just don’t want to go.’

  ‘But it’d do you good, Winnie. After being so ill, an’ everythin’. You have to go back soon, don’t you?’

  ‘Next week. They’ve posted me to Flaxton.’

  ‘That’s only a few miles away. Better ’n Scotland. What sort of place is it?’

  ‘It’s a Conversion Unit for bomber crews. They re-train them onto new aircraft.’

  ‘Bombers! Fancy you workin’ on those big engines, Winnie. Must be so difficult.’

  ‘Not when you’ve been taught how.’

  ‘You should’ve been a Land Girl like me, then you wouldn’t’ve had to learn a thing. Milkin’ cows, muckin’ out, pullin’ turnips, pickin’ sprouts, cleanin’ ditches . . .’ Nora rolled her eyes. ‘Sometimes it gets me down. Still, it’s my birthday on Saturday and there’s the dance to look forward to then. Say you’ll come to it, Winnie. Go on! For my sake.’

  Winnie set the lamb down gently and watched it wobble off to rejoin the other one. ‘All right then, Nora, seein’ as it’s your birthday an’ that, I s’pose I can’t say no.’ She didn’t want Nora thinking she was afraid.

  She heard the music long before she saw the band. It sounded loud enough to wake the dead – a whole lot of brass instruments blasting some tune out at top speed. She could hear it clearly in the cloakroom where they’d gone first to take off their coats. Nora was in her Land Army uniform, which she said Buzz liked a lot, and she went straight to the mirror to put o
n some more of the bright pink lipstick that he’d given her. Winnie didn’t think it went very well with the green and brown but she didn’t say anything. She was in civvies herself – the old cotton frock she’d worn when she’d gone off to Colston. She stood waiting for Nora and listening to two ATS talking to each other in put-on American accents. They kept giggling and nudging each other. She already wished that she hadn’t come.

  Nora grabbed her arm; her mouth was a glistening pink bow. ‘Come on, let’s find Buzz.’

  It was like being thrust into a foreign land. There were Americans everywhere – smooth American uniforms, loud, drawling American voices, back-slapping, gum-chewing, hands-in-pockets, bold-eyed Americans . . . She hurried after Nora who was heading in the direction of the music. It was growing louder at every step and by the time they reached the entrance to the big hall where the dance was being held, she felt like clapping her hands over her ears.

  In front of her a seething mass of dancers twisted and writhed and leaped about. She watched them in amazement. Nora was jigging from side to side, swinging her arms to the beat of the music. A small and wiry airman bounded up to her.

  ‘Hiya, doll!’

  ‘Winnie . . . this is Buzz.’

  ‘Hi there, sugar. How ya doin’?’ He nodded to her and clicked his fingers at Nora. ‘Come’n, baby, let’s dance.’

  He jerked Nora away into the mass and Winnie backed nervously against a wall. The music was getting even louder, the dancing even more frenzied. The brass players in the band had leaped to their feet and were trumpeting and sawing up into the air and down at their feet, and the drummer was flailing about him like a madman. She could feel the whole floor shaking beneath her. It made her dizzy to watch the men spinning their partners back and forth and round and round. She stared at a couple whirling towards her – a tall, fair airman dancing with a blond girl in a mauve dress and high-heeled shoes. They were so good that people were making room for them. Winnie gasped as the American tossed the girl clean over his shoulder. There was a flash of her suspenders and knickers for all to see and an even clearer view as she slid on her back along the floor straight between his legs. It had brought them close to the wall and as he jerked the girl to her feet again and swung her round, he winked broadly at Winnie standing a few feet from him, open-mouthed.