by Chris Jory
Wonderful to be gone for three days, into the car and up into Oxfordshire and down to Elm Tree Farm where Jacob stayed when she was there, and in the top room they lay together in the still of the night and when she woke she found him in the chair by the window, looking out over the fields where Norman walked among his cows, Norman thinking as he walked, thinking of Jacob and Rose and how a wrong can sometimes be a right.
***
‘These are for you, son,’ said Norman one day after Rose had gone. Jacob took the cage. The birds sat together. One looked at him, rolled an eye, cooed.
‘Just like Eric and Penelope,’ Jacob said.
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘Where I get everything. From the wood.’
‘Thought so. Thank you, Norman, they’re marvellous.’
Jacob took the birds up to Mill View Cottage and put them in the out-house’s empty cage and closed the door. Upstairs in his room he took out the box of eggs he had taken when he was a boy, when Norman showed him where to go to find the best ones, clambering up the trees together, Norman gripping a branch beneath him, waiting to catch him should he fall, and Jacob peering into the nest, taking one egg, leaving the others, and Jacob’s smile when he saw the thing, the specks and freckles, like the specks and freckles that the summer sun lifted up on Rose’s face, and he would take it and pass it to Norman, and they would walk home together discussing the best way of putting a hole in each side and blowing out the thing that was in it.
Jacob divided his days now between Mill View Cottage and Elm Tree Farm. He kept his gun at the farm, the gun that Norman had given him.
‘I’ve bagged many a brace with this,’ Norman said. ‘Had it for years. It’ll do you well.’
And Jacob used it in the woods at dusk, navigating the paths that Norman had shown him in his youth, the roosting points and the low boughs with the fat silhouettes dark against the trees, the searchlight beam of Jacob’s torch and him peering down the sight in the dark, the flash of the gun and a flying thing falling now, tipping away down, a burning bird, and the rummage in the nettles, their sting on his skin not bothering him now, nothing there to feel it, and Norman down the hill in the farm washing off the smell of muck and hearing the gun and little nervous ripples slipping across the water of the bath, Norman’s physical response to his wondering if he had done right to give him the gun, might Jacob have used it on himself this time, blowing away the face he had been left with? But no, he concluded, as long as there was Rose there was hope, and he must find a way to persuade the boy that he and Rose must be together again. Then the sound of knocking on the door as Norman was dressing, and Vera in the hall, letting him in, Jacob’s voice full of the wood and what it gave him now, life again, breathing it in, and the birds on the table and Vera cutting out their guts and their feathers plucked out, loading up the kitchen table with their beauty, Jacob and Norman swigging as they plucked and Vera bustling around above. Then the birds going in the oven and Jacob thinking, dwelling on it, watching the roasting birds, roasting golden brown until their skin cracked and spat with fat the way skin does in a burning plane. The way it does in a burning building too, he knew that too. The doctor had told him so, what it was like beneath the bombs, in the firestorm, Hamburg 1943.
***
It went on this way for months, stretching into a year, then two. Always the same toxic mix of happiness and grief, a love hauled back from the edge of death, kept alive on life support, suffering, better perhaps to let it die.
‘I’d still come back to you, Jacob,’ she said. ‘Even now.’
‘With the little one and everything?’
‘Yes, everything.’
‘But you can’t.’
‘I would, for you I would.’
‘It’s impossible, Rose. It’s a dream, let it go.’
And then that last time, in 1952, at the house in Surrey, Ralph away again, Jacob turning up on his bike, the kid left with a baby-sitter for the afternoon, Rose and Jacob out on the lake in the punt, heads thrown back and staring at the sky. Like they did when they made love, when they were young.
‘Jacob,’ she said at last, as the swallows dipped and turned above the lake. ‘Jacob, you’re going to have to take me back. Take me back or you won’t be able to see me again …’
‘Don’t do that to me, Rose. Please don’t do that. Let us carry on like this. It does no harm, Ralph needn’t know. And it’s not as if I’m a threat to him.’
‘But you are, Jacob. You are. Because you have my heart. You always have.’
‘Rose, I’m so sorry for the bother I’ve caused you …’
‘Oh, life’s such a bind sometimes, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘What it does to you.’
He nodded, hesistant now, broken.
‘So then, Jacob. Take me. Take me back or lose me.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said at last.
But he knew it was impossible. He would not condemn her to that, to life with him, forever with him. But nor could he stand the thought of life without her, after all he had been through, so he left without resolution. He took the bike up through the gears, tearing at the road, at the wind, into the wrong lane and over the breast of a hill, howling out her name as the lorry hurtled in and he ducked back out of its path at the last moment and his howl was drowned out by the roar of the engines and the lorry’s horn and the hammering about that hurtled through his head, that mad pumping, the pumping of a heart run wild, and back in Surrey Rose felt her heart winding down again, fuel running low, truth filling up her engine now with emptiness, the emptiness of certainty, the certainty of what his answer would be to her foolish ultimatum. And so she decided that she would have to bend, she would have to give in, to accept him on his terms if she could not have him on hers.
But how could he have known that, as he spent the following days out in the woods, overloading Norman’s table with pheasant and rabbit and hare? He waited, waited for her next letter, but it was delayed, the Royal Mail going down the tubes. So out on the bike again, tired of the gun, tired of the game, out along the Churchill Road and into the fog, then past Kingham and into the wolds, along the wrong lane around the bends and over the hills. And then the other vehicle, not a lorry this time, just a small slow-moving car. But Jacob was really travelling now, he was really going home, and the speed did the job.
Norman took the call.
‘It’s the police,’ he said to Vera. ‘They said I’d better go.’
‘Oh, my God. Who is it? Father?’
‘No, let me see to this, Vera. I’ll be back shortly.’
Then Norman’s slow trawl out into the countryside, going steady, up through the gears as he always did, less happy with machines than with beasts. Then finally the little gathering on the road in front of him, pulling the car over, the policeman’s hand upon his back, gentle, almost a caress.
‘Yes, it’s him,’ said Norman. ‘Let me take him.’
‘You can’t, sir. There’s a protocol.’
‘Let me have him, I said. I don’t want to leave him here in the road.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. He has to stay with us. I’m sorry.’
Norman put Jacob’s personal effects on the kitchen table when he got home and went up to Mill View Cottage to break the news to Alfred and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s head hit the floor again when she heard, the second time Jacob had done that to her with his going.
‘He let his birds out today,’ said Alfred. ‘The ones you gave him, Norman. The pigeons. I thought that was an odd thing for him to do.’
They went round to take a look. The cage door was open.
‘They’re not in the tree either,’ said Alfred, looking up.
‘They won’t be,’ said Norman. ‘They’ve gone for good, haven’t they? They were wild ones, those. Were never meant to be in a cage anyway, I suppose.’
Vera phoned Rose with the news and that evening she drove up to Chipping Norton, leaving Ral
ph and the little one on a pretence. She sat with Norman and Vera, perched on kitchen chairs, silent for a while.
‘This was in his pocket,’ Norman said at last, passing Rose the letter. She unfolded it, saw the gothic handwriting, read it through as Norman watched her.
Dear Tommy Bomber
Let me explain to you how it was, what you did in July 1943, how you took my life away. Four times you came to drop your gifts. Or was it five? I lost count in the end, lost count of the days, of the bodies. Of the limbs, the ones I saw and the ones I removed. The people I buried, the bits of them. The first night was bad enough, but when you came back again, I forget now, the second time or the third, which was it now, the firestorm? You can probably tell me, Tommy, you had the best view, up there, looking down, twenty thousand feet or so. A panoramic view, I would suggest, no? Beautiful perhaps, all that orange light, silent down beneath you. You could feel the heat in your belly through the skin of the plane? I heard that was so from captured airmen, the ones I was meant to save. Imagine that, Tommy, heat rising twenty thousand feet into you? How must it have felt to be in there, to be in the cellars just ten feet underground? Did you think of us then, down below, in the fire? It was hot Tommy, the weather I intend to mean, hot and humid already before you came, perfect weather for a tinderbox. And when you came back again the hot humid weather was still hanging over the city and a strong wind was blowing, fanning the flames that remained from your previous raids. Seven hundred bombers over our little city, though it seemed like more, swarms of you, in little more than an hour, swamping the defences with how many tonnes of bombs? Two thousand? Three maybe? The fire service was already dispersed and stood no chance against the volume, the intensity of the bombing, the time-delay fuses. And the cookies, those big ones? How quaint of you, that name. And the incendiaries, always the incendiaries spreading fire. Innumerable fires took hold, the roofless buildings acted like chimneys, you see. The wind created updraughts, strong updraughts that sent the flames so high into the air I thought they must burn you too and bring you down to join us. The flames leapt across buildings, onto those that were undamaged by bombs and set those ablaze too, and as the conflagration grew, fire sucked oxygen in on itself, drawing air in from the suburbs in a great howling gale and the firestorm took hold and within half an hour four square miles were a boiling mass of flame and within an hour my poor city had been consumed. In the cellars and the air-raid shelters my people cowered beneath the blasts that shook the walls of their underground hell and the firestorm above sucked the oxygen from the cellars and raised the temperature to roasting point, and thousands sat and asphyxiated or baked below ground. Those that could, hurried up cellar stairs and out into the street, but they were met there by the roar of a hellish organ, the booming resonant howl of the firestorm, beating out rhythms like the clashing of metallic drums as it whipped up hurricane winds and tornados of flame tore down the streets and across the squares and parks, ripping up trees and flinging burning human bodies high in the air and across the tops of the houses where the roofs had been. Eyes were liquefied by the heat, Tommy, jelly-like tears running down cheeks in streams, the windows in the cars and the trams began to melt and run and the fuel in bus engines exploded and bags of sugar and jars of jam and honey in grocery stores boiled and then burst – I saw all this myself – and the asphalt on the streets began to soften and then bubble beneath the feet of the fleeing people and their feet sank into the melting street and became stuck and the people collapsed into the surface of the road as their bodies lit up orange and red and blue. I saw that too. And those that made it to the water of the ponds in the park and the port docks and threw themselves in to douse the burning found that the phosphorous that burned their skin could not be extinguished by water. Tricky of you, Tommy, it continued to burn as they tried to wipe it away, smearing it across themselves, and it ate at their flesh as your flames ate their way across my city. The firestorm held this intensity for three hours and in the morning the streets were strewn with charred corpses, thousands of them, still licked by pale blue tongues of flame, those of adults shrunk to the size of infants and those of infants shrunk to very little at all. And of course many bodies simply disappeared, burnt completely away. And my wife and my son and my parents were among them, the disappeared, the house gone, all possessions gone too, no clothes, no photos, no keepsakes. Nothing at all to remember them by. Not even the street could be found, it was just rubble, everywhere rubble. I could not even find the place where we had lived, where they had died. This was your work, Tommy Bomber. Congratulations, you did it well.
And so, Tommy Bomber, what has your life been worth, what was it for? What good has come of it? No good for you now, surely, and no good for me. So remember me, Tommy, remember me please. When you look in the mirror, at that face of yours, remember me. Remember what you did – to me, to my people, to yourself – and consider for a moment the memory the world will have of you.
‘He told me about that bloody letter,’ said Rose. ‘Used to read it every day, he said, poor lad. I never want to see the thing again.’
‘Me neither,’ said Norman.
He stood up and put the thing in the stove, and the fire burned it away to nothing.
MEMORIAL, 2012
Rose had always hated the smoke of cigarettes indoors, unless of course it was filtered into the room through Jacob’s lungs, the lungs that nudged against his heart as he inflated them, making the smoke acceptable, something to be wished for then and longed for now, an impossibility. From any other source it was an irritation, an efficient means of stinking up the soft furnishings, and it still reminded her horribly of Ralph and the scattered ash he had always left in the wake of those dark hidden thoughts, thoughts about those days, the ones they almost had in common, a partial overlapping of experience, days and years from another lifetime lived by other people, lost young and hopeful versions of themselves. And even now the distaste was strong enough to force Rose into the garden before the thing could be lit.
It took her an age of careful descent to negotiate the two flights of stairs, a packet of Silk Cut in one hand, the other gripping the banister that the social services had installed the previous summer. She left the door on the latch and stood in the porch and struck a match. The cigarette sparked up as she stoked its fire with her inhalation. A glowing orange shape ascended a couple of miles away across the Cotswolds, slipping up into the night sky, then another, borne swiftly away on the New Year wind in the blue-white light of a bomber’s moon. Rose fetched her binoculars from the front room and peered through the sights at the glowing orange lights, further away to the west now, passing high over Elm Tree Farm, their burning image shuddering upon the lens as her hands shook with age and weakness and cold. She saw the surging flames and the suggestion of dark shapes against the black-blue of the sky – hot-air balloons, bearing their occupants into the night, champagne no doubt chilling their lips as they looked down on the dim lights of the villages in these first minutes of a new year.
Rose extinguished her cigarette in the pot by the door, a midden of stubs that had failed to hasten her end. She crept back up the stairs, sat at the desk in her study, tugged back the curtain, peered across the street towards the cottage where she had first set eyes on Jacob. A light had come on in the window beneath the apex of the roof at the gable end. She peered through the binoculars and into the room behind the glass – Jacob’s room, it would always be his, his childhood room, the one in which she had first seen him when she had not long since started school, the room where Jacob and Vera and William had slept before the war. They were all gone now but their ghosts hung about the place, unwilling to leave her be.
Near her desk, next to the books she had written in the decades before her eyesight began to fail, Rose kept a well-thumbed volume listing the few known facts about the nature of the incident that had initiated her demise, her long slow implosion, a steady erosion of sunlight and air, the things that had made her before fire ate her away and s
he filled up with smoke. ‘My heart is my engine,’ she had told Jacob when they were young. But her heart had combusted and burnt itself as black as a burnt-out seam of coal, starved of the oxygen his existence had given her. And the slim volume told the story, as much as was known, about what had set the fire burning, what turned her heart to coal. It was a simple black book, 224 pages of small black font, a black cover unadorned by unnecessary art or illustration, just a matter-of-fact title and a large Royal Air Force badge. Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War, 1945, one of a series of six volumes, 12,000 lost aircraft and 55,573 lost lives – 55,574 if she counted her own. She kept the books on a set of oak shelves, the ones Jacob had in his room when he was a boy obsessed with planes and the desire to be a pilot one day. She took the volume of losses for 1945 and turned to one of several pages concerning the night he had come down – a long list of Lancaster squadrons and serial numbers, their targets, take-off times, and whatever details were available regarding the nature of their destruction. She looked at the names of one doomed crew in particular, seven young men, small black crosses denoting the ones who had died.
***
The Bomber Command Memorial had finally received planning permission in the spring of 2010 and the necessary funds had since been raised for its completion at a site on the edge of Green Park.
The memorial had been a long time in coming and was opposed each step of the way. In 1992, the fiftieth anniversary of the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, a statue of Bomber Harris was unveiled by the Queen Mother outside the RAF church on the Strand. Rose and Vera stood among the crowd and they watched as the silk fell off the great bronze statue and Harris stood there with his chest stuck out as a Lancaster flew overhead, its engines drowning out the howls of the Peace Pledge Union and the others who had come to boo and jeer, the Queen Mother visibly startled at the catcalls and the shouts of ‘Murderer’ and ‘Butcher’. The crowd eventually dispersed and when the sun rose the next day the statue had been daubed with blood-red paint. Rose and Vera had travelled back up to Chipping Norton that day on the train and Vera went to the care home where Norman spent his days now in a chair by the window, quiet as a lamb, a leg and an arm crippled by a series of strokes, and she spoke to him softly, telling him about her day in London, and he nodded occasionally and then looked at her in confusion, but with something like recognition in his eyes, and said what he had often said to her in recent months.