by Chris Jory
The thirtieth trip was delayed by heavy early-December falls of snow, and the crew drew in closer to each other, a hermetically sealed unit that lived and socialised almost exclusively together now, Ralph joining his sergeants in their sub-standard accommodation, the corrugated hoop of a Nissen hut, devoid of insulation and warmed by a coke burner in the middle of the room for which they were provided with insufficient fuel. On flightless days they took walks into the trees at the far end of the airfield and brought back firewood to feed the flames, and when the flames demanded more, or when a night on the beer had stoked their imaginations, they took to dismantling old chairs and shelves and fed these to the fire instead, huddling around the glow of the flames as the damp and the cold in turn huddled up around the backs of the men, shivering in the greatcoats they would still be wearing when they crawled into bed. They spoke of their last operation, the thirtieth one, where it would be and how it would go and what they would do thereafter. Six months away from operations was the prize, half a year, a hundred and eighty days of life, an almost uncountable number of hours and minutes into which they would squeeze the realisation of a lifetime’s ambitions, perhaps a marriage, even the promise of a child, the re-establishing of family ties and a reconnection with the places from which they had come, a chance to reassess their hopes for their post-war lives, should such a thing be feasible after all, six months bringing duties no more threatening than a posting to a training unit, squeezing other young crews through the sausage-machine so that they could be grilled by fire, consumed by the greedy night. But all that must wait. First must come the thirtieth, and then, God willing, the birthday party that Ralph’s parents had been planning for their prematurely aged son and his mates, a long weekend together in their beautiful house by a lake in the Surrey countryside to celebrate the completion of his twenty-second year, a privileged existence now ravaged by time and fear and guilt. The birthday approached, Ralph a Christmas baby born between the Nativity and the cusp of the New Year, but the weather would not oblige and it kept the door to the six-month spell of life locked behind a chain of snowstorms that swept in across the North Sea and the flatlands of East Anglia and Suffolk, and before they could conclude their tour Christmas Eve dawned with a slight lifting of the cloud and the ground staff were set upon the runways with their shovels and their spades. They dug away the snowdrifts in search of the black road beneath, and the sound of shovels scraping across tarmac carried across to the mess where the airmen sat and ate their breakfast on long benches, sitting shoulder to shoulder as the sound of the shovels grated on their nerves, like the shovels of grave-diggers scraping at stony ground that was about to become a tomb, the dark womb of the earth into which they would be returned from high up in the sky by gravity’s clutching hand.
‘They can’t possibly send us up tonight,’ said Ralph, his hand jiggering his fork about in erratic pursuit of the last beans upon his plate. ‘It’s Christmas Eve. We can’t bomb on Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake.’
‘They didn’t bomb last Christmas,’ said Charlie.
‘Old Butch must have been feeling soft,’ said Jim.
‘Yes, all sentimental,’ added Jacob. ‘But they’ll send us this year, just wait and see.’
Roland stirred his tea vigorously and shrugged. ‘Can’t do much about it anyway, can we?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ said Charlie. ‘They won’t send us tonight. I’ve got a good feeling about it.’
‘Like that time we got shot up over Essen?’ said Jacob. ‘And the Dog came back with twenty holes in her belly.’
‘Yes, just like that, now you come to mention it,’ said Charlie. ‘But we got back all the same.’
‘Well tonight we’re going nowhere,’ said George. ‘They’ll keep us waiting and then they’ll pull the plug at the last minute and we’ll be at the Christmas dance instead. And Sally Simms is meeting me there.’
‘Sally Simms?’ said Jim. ‘You spawny sod!’
‘No word of a lie.’
‘Then we can’t possibly go on ops.’
The day dragged by and shortly before the main briefing the news came through – a scrub. A cheer went up, the shovels were put away, and the men went to their quarters to prepare for the dance. The night began with a prayer, then carols in the mess, food served by the officers to the lower ranks, Ralph winking at his men, then drinking and dancing and a different kind of song took hold, sung from the heart in a tone lost somewhere in a no-man’s land between jocularity and lament, ‘Every fucking evening at half past fucking eight, you can hear us on the runway with the throttles through the gate, get up you big black bastard, we’re twenty minutes late, and we’ve got to bomb the Ruhr in the moonlight!’
Charlie had drunk more than he was accustomed to and Jacob watched his face turn slowly grey and then blush a glowing pink and Charlie fell slowly into silence and a frown stitched itself upon his brow.
‘What’s up, mate?’ asked George, who had noticed it too. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, sup up and sing.’
‘I’ve just been feeling it recently, that’s all,’ said Charlie. ‘When’s it all going to end, when will we be free? I don’t know if I can carry on like this any longer.’
‘Of course you can,’ said Jacob. ‘You’ve got no bloody choice. And it’s just one more op now.’
‘I could always go LMF.’
Jacob gripped his arm. ‘No Charlie, you can’t do that to yourself, and you can’t do that to us. We won’t let you.’
‘I might not be able to help myself.’
‘We’ll bloody help you, then.’
‘I was supposed to join the clergy, you know,’ said Charlie. ‘Before the war that was the plan. How could I ever be a priest after all this?’
‘Because you’re saving the world, son,’ said George. ‘Not even Jesus Christ could do that.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jacob. ‘After all this is over it’ll be move over Jesus, Charlie Appleforth’s taking his place by God’s right side.’
Charlie grinned at the thought and as another carol started up, George and Jacob joined in loudly and Charlie mouthed the words.
‘In the deep mid-winter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, snow had fallen, snow on snow …’
Outside, as the carols were sung, the big black bastard Lancasters sat beneath their white caps of snow and listened. Finally, on the 29th, the Dog barked as the light began to fade and the engines howled their way into life, and the door slammed shut and George tapped Charlie on the shoulder and said, ‘By God’s right side, son,’ and Ralph placed his trembling hands on the control column as Jacob settled into the nose and the green light flashed in the van and the little crowd of well-wishers waved them on their way and the Dog loped along the first yards of the runway, then gathered speed and lifted her pregnant bellyful of bombs into the air and they set course for Berlin, the Big City for the big send-off. The flight path betrayed the bomber stream to the radar eyes of the watching defences and the night-fighters swarmed around the bombers on the inward leg and the flak went up, a curtain of fire hung across the sky, and the Dog took them through the buffeting blows that lifted her fifty feet and dropped her down again, and Ralph gripped the controls, his hands drained of blood and his cheeks glowing white in the night, then the eerie blue tinge of a master searchlight beam brushed the Dog’s flank and she shrugged it off, but it came again and pinned her in its glare and then more beams, bright white slaves to the radar-controlled blue, fastened onto her and the Perspex canopy became a solid white box of impenetrable light and Jacob felt the sensation of being suddenly motionless in the air, suspended in a bright white static void, and then Alan’s urgent hollering filled his ears down the intercom, ‘Corkscrew port, go!’, and Ralph hauled the plane down hard, then up and across and then down the other way, the Dog twisting this way and that in a desperate attempt to fling the searchlights from her back, and the flak flew up through the searchlight beams and burst all around and the stin
k of cordite filled the cabin and then suddenly they were out, the white turned to black, the searchlights groping after them but the Dog slipping away, and the night was just darkness with a glowing orange heart and the dark shapes of planes.
‘Where the hell’s the target gone?’ said Ralph.
‘It’s to starboard now, slightly behind us,’ said Alan.
‘We’ll have to go around again,’ said Ralph. ‘Fuck.’
He banked the plane away in a broad arc, outside the curve of the approaching stream, then tucked back in towards the end of the flow of planes. Ralph could hear the Master Bomber overhead, circling the Big City as he guided the planes in on the flares.
‘Bomb on green! Bomb on green!’ he was calling. ‘And cut out the bloody creep-back! If I see any of you shirkers releasing early …’
Creep-back, the phenomenon of bombs released slightly too soon by terrified men unwilling to fly straight and level any longer, the bombs sent away a second or two too soon, falling before the target, then another doing the same a little way behind, each time the bombs creeping further back from the aiming point, sometimes leaving a line of fires five miles long extending into the countryside outside the city.
‘I said bomb on green! On green! And ignore the bloody flak! It won’t hurt you, you know!’
Ralph pressed on towards the green-eyed city centre and then Jacob sent the bombs down and the Dog leapt up as the weight was lifted from her, and the Big City became small and dim behind them as distance doused the flames and Jim and Alan in their turrets heard brief bursts of ‘Merlin music’, choirs of angels and classical instruments playing in harmony, an auditory illusion created by the constant roar of engines, and as the music filled their ears they watched the glow of the city finally dim then extinguish itself, like the dwindling flame of a candle that has been lit too many times. And suddenly darkness, a fire gone out, Jacob at the controls and the gunners cramming down the Benzedrine and Ralph beneath the blanket on the rest-bed crying silent tears that he would dry away for landing, and George tuning the wireless to a music station as the Dog crossed the English coast, and the crew singing Abide with Me in unison as the night let them go and the Dog brought them home and the wheels kissed the ground with passion and longing and Jacob thought of Rose as he brought the plane to a stop and the engines sighed themselves into silence and the only sound now was of crewmates breathing life in again over the intercom. Hairy Mary flung the door open and clean air flooded through and it flushed away six months of hell and let life back in and life wrapped itself around them and pulled them out of the bomber and into Mary’s arms and she put them in her truck and hurried them away, leaving the Dog alone and surrounded by winter grass.
Back in the Nissen hut, Jacob lit a candle and spoke a Godless prayer, a litany of future hopes, as George shovelled coke into the burner and Charlie sat on the next bed and talked about his father and Roland lay down and closed his eyes in thought, and Jim and Alan sneaked over to the WAAFs’ quarters where Sally Simms and Hairy Mary might let them in for cups of tea but nothing stronger. A little further down the track in the officers’ quarters, Ralph Andrews looked at himself in the mirror and pulled down his bruised and bloody lip and stared into his own eyes and wondered where the confidence of youth had gone and how he had become, in half a year, a grey-eyed shell in Air Force blue with a foxhound’s bloodshot eyes and hands too shaken to sign his name on the aircraft acceptance form. But he had survived, and so had his crew, and that was an achievement beyond the reach of all but a few, a small percentage of men who were either very good or very lucky or very much both. And it occurred to him at last, for the first time, that today was his birthday, a day of celebration, the symbolic start of life, and he took off his shoes and lay on the bed and turned out the light and let the day slip away into sleep.
The crew spent the next day beneath a lifting cloud, laughter now flowing from sources other than the gallows and bitter irony, and in the evening they packed their cases and made use of the phone calls they had booked, informing their loved ones of their survival. Jacob spoke to Rose in hushed and grateful tones, the echo on the line casting his gentle words back at him down the wire, mingling with her own sweet incantations, the promises and the exultations and the joyous sign-off lit by the prospect of proximity the following day.
***
Jacob and Rose met at King’s Cross, another couple in a crowd of people uniting and separating, pairs and groups at different stages of the journey on which the war was taking them, and individuals who had already lost themselves to the conflict, or had lost their kin or their meaning and who stood on the platform in groups of one, just a greatcoat and a suitcase and a faraway stare fixed somewhere on the memories of what had been and could never be again. A small boy walked down the platform with a canary in a rusting wire cage, a patient bird awaiting the erosion of its prison by time and its longed-for flight away from the reach of the small boy’s hand and his peering face. Above the trains it would fly, high up into the vaults of the station where it would smack its head repeatedly against the glass canopy, thirty times in all, and then follow the pigeons out from under the rafters and away into the blue of the sky, a trilling speck of yellow escaping the gaze of the world. It sat in its cage and regarded Jacob and Rose with its black ball-bearing eye as they pecked each other on the cheek and then wrapped themselves in a full-blown soaring kiss, and the crowd milled about them and the boy and the silent caged canary disappeared and Jacob looked into Rose’s eyes and they smiled, broad beaming unbridled smiles, and they kissed again.
‘Come on Jacob, mate,’ said Jim. ‘We’ve got a train to catch and a party to attend and it’s New Year’s Eve.’
Jacob turned and grinned at his crewmates, Charlie the night-owl, Jim and George standing with Sally Simms and Hairy Mary, her hair stuck out in red streams, Roland with his wife and kid now, set just aside from the group, holding the young one in his arms, and Ralph Andrews with his officer’s cap pushed back upon his high forehead and his tall thin figure stooping forward to say something to Roland’s son, the baby boy laughing at first, then crying and burying his head in his father’s shoulder, and Roland and Ralph sharing a subsequent joke.
They reached the Andrews’ house in late-afternoon, riding up the long drive in a pair of cabs hired at the station, the cars’ dimmed-down lights just beginning to cast pale beams upon the road as darkness fell, the engines purring smoothly, and Jacob knew that away east in the flatlands Lancaster engines would be revving up for the night, their crews already at their stations and contemplating the night to come, and in the taxi Jacob heard the conversation surge and pause as the men’s thoughts flicked back and forth between what they had left behind and what lay in front of them now. As the tyres crunched across the gravel drive, the lights in the house went on and the black-out curtains were quickly drawn. Around the house stood oak and elm, tall and bare against the winter sky, and down by the lake a line of alders leaned their heads across the water as if peering at their own reflection, and a little way out a pair of punts floated, tethered to the bank by lengths of chain. The four tall chimneys of the house reached almost as high as the tops of the trees, sending plumes of smoke into the thinning sky. Mrs Andrews threw the front door open and hurried down to the car as her son stepped out and she looked at him silently, arms outstretched, and he held her tight and heard her whisper something soft and desperate in his ear. Mr Andrews came down the steps, dressed in his weekend gear of cords and brogues and a checked shirt topped by a green velvet waistcoat and a matching tie. He went around shaking hands with all the crew and kissing the ladies on the cheek and making small welcoming noises as he did so, then clipping out an order to the Springer spaniel to stop jumping up and muddying the uniforms of the guests. Then he picked up a suitcase in each hand and ushered everyone inside and took them all to their assigned rooms, Roland and his wife and son all in together, then the men in pairs, and Rose and Sally Simms and Hairy Mary in the big room that lo
oked out across the lawns at the back, over the reed-fringed lake and the woods and the pasture beyond.
‘Better than our usual digs,’ Jacob said to Charlie as they put the suitcases down and sat opposite each other on soft beds thrown with chintz. They put their clothes in a large mahogany chest whose drawers had been scented with lavender oil, the same oil that had been sprinkled upon the pillows to encourage restful sleep, and a fire burned in the grate, the dry logs sending sparks up the chimney in little popping bursts.
In the oak-panelled drawing room they gathered and Mr Andrews brought two bottles of sherry up from the cellar and everyone drank a toast, first to the survival of the crew, then to the two lost gunners and to second-tour Alan Armstrong who could not be with them now, and then to Ralph Andrews and his twenty-second birthday of the previous day, and the evening passed in an oasis of civility and calm, a silent world surrounded by countryside and water and woods, and the only sound at times was the fire in the grate and the creaking of the old house as it adjusted itself to its warmth. After dinner, Mrs Andrews invited Rose and Hairy Mary and Sally into the morning room to see the tapestries she had worked up over the previous year, hunting scenes depicting men in skirts on horseback in pursuit of wild boar, and others of red-coated huntsmen behind a pack of hounds, and a large one of a skyscape, successions of black four-engined specks far away among the clouds, the English coast behind them and the dark clouds of Europe stretching out ahead.
Midnight came and Mr Andrews brought up a bottle of 1928 Port and one of Scotch and they all toasted the end of 1943 and the onset of ’44, the year perhaps that would end the war. Later on, when everyone else had gone to bed, the crew went out to the lake and drew in the punts on their lengths of chain and pushed themselves off into the darkness, drifting out into the centre of the lake where the water lay flat calm and the mist swirled about their heads. They pulled the punts together and lashed them into a single floating platform and they talked of what they would do if they ever made it back to civvy street, then turned to their impending separation as they went their individual ways to training units up and down the eastern counties, a six-dog mongrel litter dragged up together but sent away now to strange and separate homes.