by Chris Jory
‘I used to fly in planes, you know. I used to fly in planes with Jacob.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Vera said, shaking her head at the nurses in case they had overheard. ‘Yes, dear, I know you did.’
‘And the dog used to navigate. The dog used to bring the sheep home. Beautiful dog she was, Beauty they called her, Beauty, you know.’
‘I know, dear,’ Vera said again, and she patted the big strong hands that he clasped together in his lap, and she thought again of the sparrow-brown gloves she had knitted him all those years before, and her eyes remained dry but she was crying inside.
A year later both were gone, Norman buried next to Vera in the churchyard down the road, returned to the soil from which he had come, on which he had built his life since the day John Bainbridge first strapped him to an Edwardian plough in a brown-clod northern field.
***
And so, in 2012, Rose made the journey to London alone this time, taking a cab all the way from her door-step to the capital, the kind of extravagance for which she now had the money but insufficient time left in which to spend it. The cab left her at the door of the place by the river where she had stayed with Jacob on an occasion when their leave had coincided and they had spent a night among the city lights, not the streetlights and the headlamps of hurtling cars that she looked out on now, but the searchlights that had waved above the Docklands as the Heinkels roared overhead and the bombs fell away in the distance and Jacob held her in his arms, held her tight to him and whispered words of love in her ear that drowned out the noise of the bombs not with their volume but with the immensity of their meaning, words that could wipe away all the bad in the world, wrapping her in a cocoon of love that no bombs could penetrate, nor years of absence erode.
She woke early the next morning and had the receptionist call her a taxi. She murmured vague replies to the driver as he went on and on about Nicolas Sarkozy and the European Union, something he had seen in the paper that morning, and she knew that he took her murmurings as a sign of senility rather than a total lack of interest in what he was saying.
Rose paid him and struggled out onto the pavement beside the Bomber Command Memorial. The great blocks of Portland stone stood pale in the watery morning light, marked with chiselled scars, words of stone in eulogy to the squadrons of men who had given their lives. In the centre of the memorial, among the Doric columns, stood a bronze statue of the seven men of a Lancaster crew, the air around them lit by the searchlight beam of a spotlight embedded in stone at their feet. A respectful crowd gathered around the monument and then high overhead flew the last Lancaster bomber in England, releasing a torrent of poppies into the blue summer sky, and the plane’s engines would have wiped out the noise of any protesters who stood out of sight, booing and hissing and calling out ‘Murderers’ and ‘Butchers’ and ‘Remember Dresden’, and the group of Bomber Command veterans who were seated at the front did indeed remember Dresden – and Hamburg and Essen, Berlin and Dortmund, and all the bloody others – and as they walked away at the end of the day they passed by the place where a column of smoke had earlier been, past a small group of men who had set a Union flag burning while chanting their condemnation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That night Rose dreamed that she returned to the memorial at dawn, approaching it through a mist so thick that she did not see until the last few yards the vulgarity of the words that had been sprayed upon it overnight and the blood-red paint that was splattered across the bronze of the seven-man crew. She gently reached out and felt the paint still wet beneath her fingertips, and she took a handkerchief from her pocket and stretched as if to wipe the paint from the young men’s eyes, but they were out of reach, high above her now, so she wiped the red mess from their boots instead. When she looked up there was an old man standing at her shoulder, dressed in a dark blue blazer and a beret, a medal upon his chest. Rose saw in his red-rimmed rheumy eyes the moist suggestion of memories or tears as he gazed at the crew, and then the man shook his head, turned his back on the crew, walked into the mist and was gone.
The dream dissuaded Rose from returning to the memorial the following day as she had planned, lest the fears she had dreamed be proved true. Instead she took a taxi home to Chipping Norton and in her study she took out the school exercise book that Elizabeth Arbuckle had given her as a keepsake after Jacob had been reported missing, the book in which Jacob had written as a schoolboy his stories of the future and how he would be a pilot one day. She flicked through the pages and read the fading words, admired the flowing neatness of the writing and the almost turquoise ink and the careful consideration of the phrasing for one so young. She stopped at an entry dated 1937, when Jacob was fourteen, still only a child but already just a few short years before he died. The question the teacher had set was written at the top of the page, ‘What are your ambitions for the future?’ and Jacob’s answer was written neatly underneath. Rose mouthed the words silently as she read, remaking his words as they departed her mouth:
‘My ambition is to live a good life. By this I mean an exciting life and a worthwhile one. For some people, this would mean being a doctor or a teacher or a priest – but I can’t imagine myself as a priest, even though I want to live a good life and be a good person and do good things. Because I can’t really be a priest if I don’t believe in God, even though I know that I have to spell His name with a capital letter out of respect or similar feelings. My father does not believe in God – he says that he is my father and I do not need another one to look after me in the sky – and I believe what my father tells me, because I am a good son, and so I don’t believe in God. But I do think it would be useful to have somebody in the sky who will look after me in the future, because my ambition is to be a pilot and to have adventures in airplanes and to fly around the world. Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but I shall probably manage it if I set my mind to it and try my best. And when I have seen the world, I will return to Chipping Norton and I will meet my ‘one true love’ (I have read about people like this in books, but I don’t think I’ve met one yet) and we will live in a house with a fishpond and a vegetable patch and we will have some children – I don’t know exactly how many yet, but I suspect quite a few – and we’ll all be quite happy together.’
Rose closed the exercise book and lit herself a cigarette. She was too tired now to bother about going downstairs and into the garden and instead she opened the window, drawing in the smoke as she did so. Then she opened the drawer of her desk and took out the last piece of him she had left, the fuel that had fed his lungs with the strength to carry on through all those years in the war. The silver cigarette case had dulled with age, engraved with his name and etched by life’s thousand tiny scars. She opened it and gently removed the cigarette, brown and dry, a dead little chrysalis in the palm of her hand, and she saw again the face of the broken man – the fire-starter – who had lit the thing and desperately sucked it down to a stub more than half a century before, and she wondered once more about the butterfly that might have emerged.
Then she snapped the lid shut on the stub-end of her memories and she took the other thing from the drawer, the page on which Jacob had written to her late on in the war, a man then, hanging on to the edge of the cliff of death. She unfolded the fading page, the edges dissolving with the years, the cracks along the folds letting light back in from beyond, from the time when Jacob had written down his feelings and given them to her in a poem. She read it again silently now.
The Circle of Love
The rooks are wheeling now, my love
Where night-owls used to be
The tree-tops spindly, black and bare
Against the growing rays of day
And far above, the circle of love
Packs itself away, and waits
To show its face again
Beyond the sun-burnt day
And though the sun burns off the night
The moon’s still there, unseen
Until the circl
e turns again
And darkness sets her free
And when the night comes in again
And the sun is washed away
The moon lights up our life again
Lights up the vaulted sky
The circle turns, I turn to you
The rooks have gone away
The owl comes out on silent wings
And joins us in the sky
And then the moon, for me and you
Redraws its circle, waxes new
She’s always there, even if unseen
The circle of love, for eternity
Rose lifted her gaze and looked across the street again to Jacob’s window. The room behind the glass was dark now. Someone had turned out the light.
***
Later that year Rose was gone too, found by the postman beneath a cold December sky as the snow sheeted down, layering her in white as she sat on the bench in front of the house as if asleep, not waking now from a dream she had been having for more than sixty years. With no family left to speak of, her things were taken away and sold at a local auction house. The frames that held her photos of Jacob in his RAF uniform were bought as part of a jumbled job-lot in a cardboard box. Their new owner took out the photos and dropped them in the bin, and he sold the frames for a fiver apiece at a car-boot sale on a grey Sunday morning in the rain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raised on a mixed diet of Enid Blyton and war comics the author has always loved working with words. After studying English Literature at university he taught English living in Italy, Spain, Crete, Brazil and Venezuela. He is married and lives near Oxford though they still have a rather run-down home in Italy.
Copyright
Published by McNidder & Grace
21 Bridge Street
Carmarthen
SA31 3JS
www.mcnidderandgrace.co.uk
© Christopher Jory
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Christopher Jory has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this work is available from the British Library.
Designed by Obsidian Design
ISBN 9780857160782