The Separation (5 page)

In my mind I saw or heard or remembered the deafening sound of the engines, brilliant flashes of light in the dark sky around us, a loud bang that was repeated whenever I moved my head, a shock of cold as the windscreen in front of my face was shattered by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel, voices on the intercom, the huge and terrifying surge of the sea, the cold, the terror. I gradually emerged from the confusion, starting to make sense of what I saw around me. I realized I was in a hospital, I remembered being on the plane, I knew other men had been with me. My legs hurt, my chest hurt, I was incapable of moving my left hand. I was taken from the bed, placed in a chair, returned to the bed. Medical staff came and went. I saw my mother’s face, but the next time I opened my eyes she had gone again. I knew I was critically ill.

I tried getting answers about my illness from the staff, but as I slowly improved I realized that they would not give answers unless I asked questions. Before I could do that, I should have to formulate the enquiry in my mind. Before even that, I should have to be clear in my own mind what it was I wanted to know. I worked backwards to find the memories I needed, learning as I went.

6

While we were in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin we stayed in a large apartment in Goethestrasse. By good chance it was not far from either the Olympic Stadium or the training area at Grunewald. The apartment was owned by close friends of my mother’s family: Doktor Friedrich Sattmann, his wife Hanna and their daughter Birgit. They lived on the second floor of a huge, solidly constructed building which on one side looked down on the wide, tree-lined street where trams ran to and fro all day and much of the night, and on the other over an area of open parkland with many trees. Joe and I were given a room to ourselves at the back. We had a balcony where we could sit and enjoy coffee and cakes with the family. It was a home full of music: all three of the family played instruments. Frau Sattmann was an accomplished pianist, her husband played the bassoon. Seventeen-year-old Birgit was a violinist, studying under Herr Professor Alexander Weibl, at the Berliner Konservatorium. Everything, they told us, had been banned - they could not even go to friends’ houses to play in their small ensemble, so they played together at home.

Herr Doktor Sattmann and his wife treated us with great generosity throughout our stay, but we were left in no doubt that the doctor’s medical practice was no longer prospering. He said nothing about it to us, but every morning that we were staying in his apartment he announced formally that he was leaving to attend to his patients, then he would return only an hour or so later, reporting that only one or maybe two patients had required his services.

Frau Sattmann explained that it was no longer possible for her to continue to work at the publishing house where she had been a translator. Birgit, who was in only her first year of study at the Konservatorium, told us that she had become desperate to leave the country. I was dazzled by Birgit from the moment I set eyes on her: she was dark-haired and pretty and her face became illuminated when she smiled. She stayed shyly away from Joe and me.

Every evening Frau Sattmann would prepare a meal for Joe and myself, but the portions were small and the quality of the food was poor. Nothing was explained or described. It was during our days in Berlin that I first began to feel the emerging differences between Joe and myself that were to have such a lasting impact on us both. When we were not training together I hardly ever saw him. While I maintained a fitness regime, he went on long solitary walks around Berlin, claiming it was for exercise, but often in the evenings I would hear him discussing what he had seen and the whole area of politics with Doktor Sattmann. I tried to join in, but in truth I was not all that interested, constantly thinking ahead to our race. I began to feel that Joe was not pulling his weight, that our existence as a team was in jeopardy.

Although Joe and I were physically identical, our personalities and general outlook could hardly have been more different. It’s difficult to see yourself clearly, but I suppose it would be fair to say that my life from the age of about thirteen was a carefree, fairly selfish one. I enjoyed myself as much as I could, making the most of the advantages with which my well-off and indulgent parents provided me. Sport and flying were my main interests, with girlfriends, beer-drinking and a growing fascination with cars starting to compete for precedence as I grew older.

But Joe was different. He was always more serious than me and he put up an appearance of being more aware, more responsible. He thought about things and wrote them down, sometimes ostentatiously, I believed. He read books on subjects I knew nothing about and whose titles did not even interest me. While I went off and learned to fly, first as a private pupil, then later in the University Air Squadron, he said he was too busy studying and training. His taste in music was classical and serious, he had friends I thought of as secretive and sardonic, and he treated me with contempt and condescension if I tried to talk to him about subjects he was interested in.

Although I was on the receiving end of the rivalry I also understood what he was doing and even why he was doing it. If I was honest with myself I knew I felt much the same. If you grow up with an identical twin you are never allowed to forget it. As twins you suffer endless comments and jokes about the startling resemblance you bear for each other. People say they can’t tell you apart, even though they probably could if they took the trouble. They ask you if you think the same things. Parents dress you alike, teachers treat you alike, friends and relatives give you identical gifts or say things that automatically include you both. Superficial differences, if they are spotted, are remarked on out of all proportion to their importance. Buried in this is the assumption that the two of you must also feel alike. What you want, what you crave, is to be treated as a separate human being. It’s almost impossible while you’re a child, but as soon as you reach your teenage years and adulthood approaches, you start trying to create a distance. You want an independent life, you want to discover information your twin does not have, you want to have secrets from him. It has nothing to do with a failure of love, or a growing dislike of someone once close to you. It is quite simply the need to become an individual. In Berlin, I began to realize that the Games were all that remained to bind us together. I was often alone, training by myself, or hanging around the Sattmanns’ apartment while Joe was out somewhere with the family. In the evenings he and the Herr Doktor would go to the study, while I was left to be entertained by Frau Sattmann and Birgit. I loved their music, the fineness of their playing together, and I relished how close this brought me to Birgit, but I could not stop thinking about what was happening between Joe and myself.

However, we were there to race and at least Joe applied himself conscientiously to that. Every morning we set about our training with energy, making full use of the skills and patience of Jimmy Norton, the British team coach. Once we settled down to the strangeness of the place - the unfamiliar sights of Berlin, the unpredictable currents in the water and, above all, the sounds of so many other teams training in their own languages, the voices echoing across the water from megaphones - we managed to concentrate on what we had come to do.

Gradually, slowly, our times and performance improved. Our first aim was to complete the measured course in a modest eight and a half minutes, knowing that Edwards and Clive had won their medal in a fraction under eight minutes, although that was on a downstream course. Earlier in the summer, similarly downstream on the Thames near Oxford, Joe and I had cleared eight minutes five. We knew that this was not our limit, not the best we could do. Athletic performance is all about gradual improvement, not suddenly achieving an outstanding performance in a fluke that cannot be repeated. For the past three months we had been steadily building our speed, reducing our times.

Mr Norton encouraged us to focus our minds forward to the day of the heats, trying to think ourselves into the first race, leaving the times to set themselves.

The heat was five days away. On the first full day of training our best time was eight minutes thirty, on lake water without perceptible currents.

The next day we covered four full courses: our best time was eight minutes twenty-two. By the fourth day we could touch eight minutes nineteen every time we tackled the course.

7

Five years later I was in hospital in rural Warwickshire, working backwards to memory. I understand now that my memories arrived in the wrong order. Maddeningly, I remembered the end of the incident first, with no recollection of what had led up to it.

There was a slamming noise, a loud crash made by the shrapnel as it burst through the fuselage a couple of feet behind me, low down, somewhere underneath, bursting through into the Wellington’s belly. Just by the navigator’s table, close by the wing spar. The rear gunner, Kris Galasckja, crawled forward from his turret and reported over the intercom that Sam Levy looked as if he was dead. There was blood covering his maps, Kris said. I was watching the dials, seeing the airspeed fall away, the altimeter begin a slow, unstoppable circling decline, our precious height being eaten away gradually by gravity’s suck. Down below I glimpsed the irregular black line of the German coast as we limped west, across the North Sea towards England.

A few minutes later Kris came back on the intercom and said he thought Sam was going to be all right. He’d taken a bang on the head but was breathing OK. Kris said he was going to drag him around so he could lie more comfortably on the floor, next to the hatch.

I ordered Kris back into his turret to keep an eye open for fighters. They often patrolled over the sea, waiting for our bombers as we straggled home out of formation. For the next few moments I could feel the crew moving clumsily around in the fuselage behind me, the trim of the plane affected by their changing positions. No one said anything, but I could hear their breathing in the intercom headphones clamped against my ears.

By the time they settled down our height had fallen to below twelve thousand feet and was still dropping slowly. There was no extra power in the engines. The flaps were so stiff I could hardly move the stick. The crew began jettisoning unused ammunition, kit, flares, anything removable, the cold night air blasting in not only through the holes in the fuselage but from the open hatch behind me. We droned on, following our long downwards trajectory with its inevitable end, delaying it as long as possible. An hour passed, deluding me into thinking we might be going to make it after all. We were down to four thousand feet by then. The port engine began to vibrate and overheat. Colin Anderson, wireless operator, came on the intercom and said he thought it was time to break radio silence, to send a mayday, and how about it?

‘We’re still a long way out to sea,’ I said. ‘Still got to be careful. Anyway, what makes you think I’m going to let the kite crash?’

‘Sorry, JL.’

We all wanted to get home. We hung on silently.

But a minute or so later the port engine began to falter. I changed my mind and gave Col the order to send the mayday. With three thousand feet to go, the night-dark sea passing in and out of sight through low clouds, I switched on the emergency beacon and ordered the crew to take the rafts and life-jackets and jump. They refused, so I shouted at them that it was an order. I swore at them, yelled at them to get out. It was their only real hope. The intercom was silent after that. Were they still on the plane when we hit the sea, or did they in fact jump when I told them to? I had no time to check again: we were a few seconds away from hitting the sea. The shock, when it came, was an immense physical blow - we might as well have slammed into the ground. Somehow I managed to scramble into the inflatable dinghy, barely conscious, freezing to death. I saw that Sam Levy was there in the dinghy with me. No time had passed. I must have been in shock. I was confused then, I was confused when I tried to remember it later, I am still confused all these years on.

‘Where’s the kite?’ I said, finding that for some reason I could hardly speak aloud. When Sam gave no reaction I asked him again, this time doing my best to shout.

I saw his shape there, across on the other side of the tiny inflatable. His head seemed to move as if he was speaking.

‘What?’ I cried.

‘She sank,’ I heard him say. ‘Back there somewhere.’

‘How the hell did we get out?’

‘The hatch came off in the crash. I was lying close to it and you must have crawled over. Don’t you remember?’

I remembered only chaos inside the flooded cockpit of the Wellington. Total darkness, bitter cold, the drenching of icy water that was rising around me. In an instant the cockpit had been transformed into a place I no longer understood. All sense of direction had gone. Was the area behind me up or down?

Was I lying or standing? Or still sitting at the controls? Was I face down? My leg hurt like hell. I couldn’t breathe because my face was under the water and I was choking. The oxygen mask of my flying helmet had become tangled around my throat. Then the plane lurched and the water drained dramatically away from around my head. A dim light from somewhere came glancing in. I saw two legs vanishing through the hatch. The plane lurched again.

Darkness followed, then a violent struggle. Arms and legs flailing in the water. Somehow I was in the inflatable, on the yielding, water-logged rubber floor of the dinghy, trying to twist myself so that I was face up, my fur-lined flying jacket weighed down by the water it had soaked up, the oxygen mask flapping uselessly against my neck.

‘Have you any idea where we are?’ I shouted, after what felt like half an hour of painful struggling. I was still staring across in the darkness to where I thought Sam must be lying. There was a long silence, so long that I thought he had passed out or died, or that he had somehow slipped into the sea.

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ he said in the end.