by Chris Jory
‘If I start to crack, don’t let me go that way,’ said Jacob. ‘Shove me out of the plane without a chute before you let me go LMF.’
‘You won’t crack, brother. None of us will. Not this crew.’
***
The next day, Jacob and Harry met up with Jim in London. They caught the train to Oxford, then the bus to Woodstock and Vera looked up as the shop bell rattled and she saw her brother standing in the doorway.
‘Hello Vera,’ he said, taking off his cap and smiling as she ran round from behind the counter and hugged him to her.
‘Jacob, thank God you’re here! It seems so long since I saw you.’
‘It certainly does. You look great, Vera. I love the pink apron. Here, this is Harry, I told you about him in my letters, and Jim, one of our gunners.’
They shook hands and Jim made a joke about the names of some of the sweets, and Vera opened one of the jars and they dipped their hands inside and were all sucking on barley sugar when Jingle came back from his trip to the post office.
‘Hello, what have we got here?’ he said, laughing. ‘All these uniforms. Have we been invaded? So tell me, which one of you is Vera’s bomber brother?’
‘This is Jacob here, Mr Bell.’
‘Well done, Jacob, lad,’ said Jingle, shaking him vigorously by the hand. ‘Aim those bombs right on the Jerries’ heads, eh? Right on Mr Hitler’s bloody great Teutonic bonce, that’ll teach him to come dropping bombs on us.’
‘Too right, mate,’ said Jim enthusiastically. ‘We’re giving old Adolf a right pasting, no two ways about it. We’ll burn Germany end to end before we’re done and they’ll have bloody deserved it too.’
‘Here you go, lads,’ said Jingle, passing them each a small paper bag. ‘Tell me the ones you want, whichever you like, fill those bags up with sweets, you bloody deserve them.’
They went for a walk around the shops and stopped at a pub for a beer which turned into two and then three, then picked Vera up from the shop and caught the bus to Chipping Norton together.
‘There’s a dance band at the Town Hall this evening,’ said Vera as they walked towards West Street. ‘You’re all coming along, aren’t you? It’ll be great fun. Norman’s coming too. You know how much he likes watching everyone dance, poor man, he so wishes he wasn’t such a rotten dancer himself, feet of clay he has.’
‘Oh yes, we’ll be there,’ said Jacob. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’
‘They get so packed out, the dances,’ she went on. ‘Sometimes it feels like there are people from all the countries of the earth in our little part of the world now, American airmen, Australians, Canadians, Poles. They all speak so funny when they’re drunk, sometimes you can hardly understand a word they’re saying – and that’s just the Yanks.’
Jacob and Harry and Jim spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden next to the orchard as Elizabeth ferried them plates of homemade cake, light on sugar but heavy on the butter made by Vera at the farm, and endless cups of tea, and they sat and smoked their cigarettes and talked with a certain bravado about ops and kites and squadron life while Elizabeth busied herself among the fruit trees within earshot, but when she had gone inside their conversation adopted a more reflective tone and it occurred to Jacob that if one had been eavesdropping now, the true nature of their lives might have revealed a fraction of itself to the listener. Later on, while Harry and Jim were lured by Alfred to the orchard so he could run them through the story of his pigs, Vera arrived with Norman and Daphne.
‘Uncle Jacob!’ Daphne squealed in delight, and threw herself at him. He picked her up and held her under one arm, then spun her behind his back and up onto his shoulders where she sat beaming, her chin propped up on the top of his head.
‘You’re getting to be a big girl now, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘How old are you now Daphne? Six?’
‘Six and a little bit.’
‘Wow,’ said Jacob. ‘Six and a whole little bit! Are you coming to the dance this evening?’
She shook her head and giggled as if she had never heard anything so silly.
‘Really?’ said Jim, ‘So who am I going to dance with?’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Alfred. ‘There’ll be plenty of young ladies happy to dance with an RAF chap like you.’
‘Well what are we waiting for, then?’ said Jim, winking at Harry. ‘Let’s go.’
When they got to the Town Hall the music had already started and they found an empty table and pulled up some chairs and sat and looked at the dance floor where a solitary couple were moving out of time with each other, holding each other in a way that suggested their intimacy was not yet complete. The man wore a uniform that leant him a certain bearing but also a formality in keeping with the music’s sombre tone, and when the music stopped the couple went back to their place on the other side of the room and it was then, in the light of the wall sconces, that the reason for the awkward distance of their waltz was revealed, the man’s right sleeve hanging limp and empty where his arm would have been before it was removed by the war.
Alfred and Norman came back to the table with their hands full of drinks, then Jacob fetched the others on a tray, and Alfred drank half his pint down in one long draw and offered his hand to Elizabeth and they joined the others who had begun to populate the dance floor. Alfred held Elizabeth close to him and Jacob nudged Vera and nodded towards them and they both grinned. Harry and Jim were discussing the details of the second Hamburg raid, comparing notes on their time of arrival over the target and the fighter activity on the way in and out and the planes they had seen coned by searchlights and blasted with flak. The music hammered out now, a strident ringing noise lifting others to their feet, and Jim and Harry struck up a conversation with a couple of Wrens at the next table and before long they had paired up on the dance floor and when their dance was over they sat together as the night slipped by in a blur of music and light and the sound of feet on boards.
‘Let’s dance,’ said Vera to Norman, taking his hand, but he smiled his lack of acceptance and took another sip of his beer.
‘I’m all right here, dear,’ he said. ‘I’m happy just watching.’
‘Oh, come on Norman, just this once. Twirl me round the room, sweep me off my feet.’
‘She thinks I’m bloody Fred Astaire, your sister does,’ Norman said, winking at Jacob.
‘Come on then, Jacob,’ said Vera. ‘Come dance with your sister,’ and they were up and into the crowd and Norman looked on and took another swig of his beer and regretted his leaden feet and his ruggedness. He stood up and went to the bar and got talking to an American who was working as ground crew at one of the nearby airfields, and they found they had much in common having each grown up on farms, in South Dakota and County Durham, and they spent much of the rest of the night comparing breeds of cattle and sheep and methods of preparing feed for the winter, but eventually Vera intervened and persuaded Norman out onto the dance floor and they moved awkwardly around the room, Norman smiling apologetically each time his size 12s missed the beat or dropped themselves onto Vera’s retreating toes, and when the piece ended he beat a quick retreat to the table and lifted his glass again to his lips, a barricade against further humiliation.
‘You were wonderful, dear,’ said Vera, and Norman grinned sheepishly and Alfred put his arm round him and then patted the back of his head and said something gruff and unintelligible.
They finally got home after midnight and sat up until late in the sitting room as Alfred got out his bottles of twelve-year-old Scotch that he kept for special occasions. By the time they creaked their way up the stairs to bed the birds were anticipating the dawn with their chirpings. The next morning, Jacob took Jim and Harry down to Elm Tree Farm and they went for a walk out across the fields to the wood at the top, past the land girls and the prisoners of war who were helping in the fields. They watched the German airmen as they passed, fighter and bomber pilots who had been shot down three years before in the Battle of Br
itain, and Jacob recalled the conversation he had had with one of them then, the one who had seemed so old but was probably not much older than Jacob himself. The Germans looked up as the men went by in their RAF uniforms and one of the prisoners made a comment and the others laughed and Jim made a coarse remark that was lost in translation. They went back for lunch at the Arbuckles’ house where Elizabeth was getting the meat out of the oven and they sat down in the dining room and Alfred took up the two-pronged fork and the carving knife and started to slice up the pork. Elizabeth ladled on the vegetables and they began to eat and Harry commented favourably on the quality of the food and how it compared to what they usually got in the sergeants’ mess.
‘Yes, we’re lucky out here in the country,’ said Alfred. ‘Still able to get proper food if we grow it ourselves, in spite of the rationing. I killed this one just yesterday, as I knew you were all coming.’
‘What’s this one called, then, father?’ asked Jacob, and Elizabeth stiffened slightly in her chair.
‘He used to call them all after British politicians, you know,’ Jacob went on, looking at Harry and Jim. ‘But then of course when the war started, it was the Germans’ turn, isn’t that right, father?’
Jacob grinned, suddenly boyish again, grinning at his gruff old man. Alfred smiled back at his son who had suddenly become a man himself, and he nodded.
‘That’s right, my boy. Dead right.’
‘You’ve worked your way through Goering and Goebbels and Rommel by now, I should guess?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve been through most of the generals now,’ said Alfred.
‘Would anyone like some more potatoes?’ said Elizabeth.
‘So now I’ve started on …’
‘Or carrots?’ Elizabeth asked, rather urgently.
‘So now I’ve …’
‘Alfred!’ she said tartly.
‘As I was saying,’ Alfred went on, ‘so now I’ve started on the cities. This one is Hamburg, no pun intended.’
Harry paused his fork just before his mouth and placed it back on his plate and took a sip of beer. No one spoke for a moment.
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He hasn’t been the same since they shelled him at Ypres,’ and Jim laughed and placed a large forkful of pork in his mouth.
‘Well whatever it’s called,’ Jim said, ‘it tastes bloody great.’
After lunch, Jacob and Harry and Jim walked into town and down to the common where the shallow lake froze up in winter, where Jacob had gone skating with Rose and William three years before. The conversation never strayed far from the war and their squadrons, and they debated the true nature of Arthur Harris, ‘Butch’ Harris, the chief of Bomber Command, a distant figure to the crews, rarely if ever seen around the aerodromes but an ever-present figure in their lives, the arbiter of who would fly, and how many, and where and how they would bomb, and when, and by extension therefore who would die, and what percentage of the bomber force could be lost on each operation without eroding its men and machinery to the point of ineffectiveness, five per cent a shade too high they had heard, though sometimes this percentage doubled or even tripled, but the crews went out night after night, whenever the weather allowed, and always a proportion did not return, multiples of six or seven at a time, crew-sized losses, and the lockers in the crew room bore scars and chips to their paintwork where they had been forced open to recover the belongings of those who had failed to return and had also failed to leave a key behind.
‘What do you reckon old Butch is really like?’ said Jim. ‘Do you think he’s really the tough old bugger he’s said to be?’
‘Can’t see how he can be anything else,’ said Jacob.
‘Well he certainly can’t be the artistic type,’ said Harry.
‘The artist of our destruction,’ said Jim.
‘Did you hear that story about him?’ said Jacob. ‘Speeding back to Bomber HQ at High Wycombe one night, stopped by a couple of police motorcyclists and cautioned. You should be more careful says one of the policemen – you might have killed someone. My dear boy, says Harris, I kill thousands of people every night.’
They all burst out laughing
‘And then,’ continued Jacob, ‘they gave the bugger an escort home!’
They all fell about again, their laughter empty in the darkening void of night.
‘Good old Butch,’ said Jacob.
‘Bloody Butcher Harris,’ said Harry.
‘And who’s he butchering?’ said Jim. ‘Them or us?’
‘Bloody both, I should say,’ said Jacob. ‘We’re all for the chop in the end, us in the planes and them on the ground.’
‘I’m not sure which is worse,’ said Harry.
‘It’s all fire in the end,’ said Jim. ‘It’ll burn you just the same whether you’re in the air or under the bombs.’
‘Cheery lot, aren’t we?’ joked Jacob.
‘Oh yes,’ said Harry, laughing. ‘Right happy mob, we are.’
And they stood up and walked into town and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking heavily at the Fox Hotel and competing to see who could eat the most pickled onions from the jar on the bar, and who could be the last to throw up in the gents from the beer and the onions and the quiet constant fear that had really got a grip on them now.
***
They returned to their squadrons two days later, Jacob and Jim saying goodbye to Harry at King’s Cross and catching their train towards Cambridge as Harry headed north to Lincolnshire. Jacob and Jim reached the airfield towards dusk, the sound of Merlin engines greeting them from beyond the rise in the land where the airfield lay, and as they walked through the main gate the Lancasters were taxiing around towards the end of the runway, one after another, then the green light flashed in the signals van and a pilot released his brakes and his plane lumbered past the crowd of ground crew and WAAFs who were standing by the runway to wave the planes off, and at the very end of the runway the first plane hauled itself off the ground and climbed quickly and banked away and another was already airborne behind it, then another, until they were all gone, a long line of planes heading for Germany.
The following day ops were on again, and Jacob went out with Ralph and Roland to check on the Dog as the fuel load went on.
‘Looks like a maximum,’ said Roland, as the fuel line spewed its contents into the tanks in the wings.
‘The full eight hours,’ said Ralph. ‘Nice one to have first op back after leave. Best get popping the bloody Benzedrine.’
Jacob passed by the post room and collected a letter from Rose, smiling at the news that she had secured three days’ leave in a month’s time and would come down to stay in a room at the pub as she had promised. But such things would have to wait, and Jacob joined the rest of the crew for the main briefing at four.
‘Hello, chaps,’ said the intelligence officer, surveying the rows of skulls in front of him again now. ‘Tonight it’s a big one, the Big City,’ and Jacob saw the curtain fall away from the map of Europe that covered the front wall of the briefing room, the lengths of red wool stretching out their route from the east of England, dog-legging at the turning points, then on to Berlin through bright red clusters indicating the flak that he knew so well now, the slow rise and sudden acceleration of the tracer shells as they passed him on their way into the infinity of the sky. Then the pre-flight meal, bacon and beans bringing back the sick taste of ops, shoving that feeling right back down his throat, and he swallowed it down and felt it hollowing away at his guts. The crew gathered in the crew room later to wait for the off and they sat and smoked and Jacob and George started an aimless game of billiards, caring little whether the balls hit the pockets, the money that they wagered meaningless currency until the morning came and they had earned another day in which to spend their winnings or regret what they had lost. George won anyway, as he usually did.
‘Here you go,’ said Jacob, tossing the notes towards him across the baize. ‘Don’t spend it all at once, will you?’
‘Want to win it back?’ said George, taking a pack of cards from the side-table on which he had let his cigarette burn itself to a stub, and they found a couple of empty chairs and sat down to see which way the money would travel this time. Jacob’s gaze flicked back and forth from the cards to the other members of his crew who sat around on the chairs and sofas that were strewn about the room. He watched over them now, feeling their mood, little tell-tale signs he had come to know. Ralph’s eyes glazed half-heartedly across a newspaper, but he was clearly only pretending to read, his thoughts wandering elsewhere as the edges of the paper quivered. Charlie sat with eyes closed, affecting indifference, but his face was drawn and grey and his lips moved just a touch, the hint of a prayer. Roland sat in silence and twitched. Jim just looked around the room under a blue-grey pall, one cigarette after another, an incessant consumption of smoke. Next to Jim was a gunner from another crew, coughing and yawning to excess, getting up frequently to visit the loo, then blowing his nose as if something had got itself inside of him and he had to get it out.
‘He’s for the chop,’ Jacob thought. He had seen the ‘chop look’ before, and he knew it when he saw it. Those who had it knew they had it too, which only made it worse. But that was how it worked, a spell cast upon them, some sort of sign that tonight fate would turn its back, perhaps a gathering of rooks in a tree as the man took an afternoon walk, or the barracks cat choosing his bed upon which to leave a dead mouse or a carefully placed turd, or just a feeling, a sixth sense that this was the night that had chosen to claim them, the date upon which their names would be written, on which wives and families would ponder their end, and Jacob found himself thinking how Rose and the others would wonder at what exactly had befallen him, was it a fighter or a flak-burst or the weather or a failing in the Dog that had brought him down, and what had he felt when it came, was it a drawn out thing, with time to contemplate the end as the plane took flame and burned away slowly to the ground, the kind of demise he had seen attach itself so often to other planes and their men beside him in the sky, or was it a vertical spinning descent that pinned him inside too far from the hatch, or would it all come suddenly with no time for terror, just a single 88mm shell striking the open bomb bay on the bombing run, turning the thirty-ton Dog to vapour in the bright white blink of a burning eye? Then he noticed a man looking at him from the other side of the room, studying him, that curious knowing look, keening in, like a vulture around a thing that it thinks is going to die.