I'll Be Seeing You (12 page)

The track continued for at least a mile and I passed several concrete bays overgrown with weeds and moss. Parking places for the bombers? The bombers would have used the perimeter track to get round the airfield, though it must have been much wider originally. I had only to keep going and sooner or later I would be bound to reach the runway. I rounded another corner and there it was – a hundred feet or more wide and extending far into the distance. A colossal pathway to the skies. Grasses and weeds and thistles sprouted from big cracks and concrete had crumbled into potholes, but it was still there. Eerie. Spine-tingling.

I switched off the engine and got out of the car. The combine had stopped. There was a soft little breeze and no sound except for the trill of the skylarks overhead and the rustle, like heavy skirts, of the Common Market wheat – short, dense and high-yielding. In wartime farmers would have grown the old-fashioned kind with long stalks and feathery ears that whispered in the wind.

I stood there, picturing the American bombers queuing up for their take-off run, roaring hell-for-leather down the runway, climbing away on some hideously dangerous mission. Men aged nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two . . . Ten in each plane; ten lives in the balance. My father one of them.

Then the combine harvester started up again and broke the spell. I got back into the car and drove slowly down the runway, weaving a way between the potholes and the clumps of grass and the weeds. A hare accompanied me for part of the way, zigzagging ahead like a demented outrider, and then veered across the concrete to flatten itself, ears down, in a ditch. At the far end, I rejoined the perimeter track, turning left in the direction of a flat-roofed building with metal-framed windows, an ironwork balcony projecting at the front and round two sides and more railings on the roof: obviously the control tower that the barman had spoken of. And, soon after, there were more wartime buildings – brick-built and tin-built, and two curved hangars like giant Nissen huts.

Further on, I could see the tiled roof and cream walls of an old farmhouse and I took a gravelled driveway that led towards it, passing outbuildings and sheds, a barn and a pond surrounded by willow trees. A black Labrador lay panting in the shade outside a side door and struggled up as I approached, wagging its tail. There was a bell hanging outside the open door with a rope attached to the clapper and I rang it and waited. After a moment a girl appeared, carrying a child on her hip, another larger child in tow. She was dressed in jeans and a man's shirt, her long hair worn in a thick plait down her back, no make-up, very striking.

I said, ‘I'm so sorry – I should have gone to the front.'

She smiled. ‘Nobody ever does. Everyone comes and goes this way. It's easier. Can I help? Are you lost, or have you come to see the airfield?'

‘To see the airfield, actually. I came up the Nightingale Lane way and I've been driving round a bit. I hope you don't mind.'

‘Of course not. Anyone who's interested is welcome – unless they're yobs from the towns. We've had some of those riding up and down the runway on their motorbikes and they're a real nuisance.' She shifted the child more comfortably on her hip. ‘I'm Jessica Layton.' She ruffled the child's blond mop. ‘And this is Lottie and this one hiding behind me is Jack. He's a bit shy with strangers. Would you like a cold drink, or something? It's awfully hot, isn't it?'

I thanked her and she led the way through a scullery and into a proper farmhouse kitchen, the Labrador padding after us. The painted dresser and cupboards must have been at least eighty years old, likewise the pine table in the centre, the monster cooking range and the porcelain sink with a draining rack above. The only modern concession seemed to be a large fridge.

She saw me looking around. ‘We haven't changed anything much since William took over from his father. We rather like it this way.'

‘So do I.'

She fetched a jug of real lemonade from the fridge, and poured a glass for me and some for the children. ‘You're not American, are you? You don't sound it. We get a lot of them wandering about, especially in the summer. They were stationed here during the war and they want to see it again. In fact, we've got a whole crowd of them coming this weekend. It's a big reunion and we're doing a lunch for them in the barn.'

I said, ‘Actually, my mother served as a WAAF here.'

‘When it was RAF, you mean? Before the Americans?'

‘Yes, then. But she stayed on when it was taken over. As a matter of fact, she came to live here with your husband's family when the Americans moved in.'

Jessica smiled. ‘I expect they thought she'd be a lot safer.'

I wondered if the Yanks had really deserved their reputation – in either sense of the meaning of the word. From all accounts, they'd had it pretty easy with the girls. Looks, glamour, money to burn. No great effort required on their part. ‘She must have known this room very well.'

‘Yes, she would have done. It's hardly altered. Has she been back at all?'

I had no idea. Perhaps she had come and had driven around, like I had just done. ‘I'm not sure. It's possible. She died at the beginning of this year.'

‘I'm so sorry. Well, if she
did
come we didn't meet her. We'd have remembered it. There's a visitors' book in the old control tower, though. She might have gone in there and signed it. That's what some of them do. I suppose they don't like to bother us at the house, so they just write nice things in it and go away. Only William's always pleased to meet them. I'm sorry he's not here at the moment. He's terribly busy with the harvest but he'll be in to grab something to eat later, if you'd like to stay. He's got all sorts of stuff on the airfield – maps and photos and things. His grandfather lived here at the time, and his mother was born here a year or two before the war started. He could tell you a lot more than I can.'

The last thing I wanted was to be a nuisance, but it seemed stupid to resist the kind offer. I stayed to sit with the children for their supper and, by that time, Jack had come out of his shell enough to allow me to cut up toast soldiers for his egg. I helped clear away afterwards and Jessica took me on a tour of the house. The non-alteration applied to most of the other rooms, and I realized, as we progressed from one to another, that it was almost exactly as my mother would have known it – the same furniture, wallpapers, paintings and ornaments. I noticed an old gramophone of similar vintage to Ma's radiogram in the drawing room and commented on it. It had belonged to the grandparents, Jessica said, like almost everything else in the house. I thought it was highly commendable that the young couple hadn't – as they might well have – modernized the lot.

‘Do you still have any of the old 78 records?'

‘Yes, we do. They're kept in that black case in the corner. The Yanks used to bring them to the house and play them and they got left here after the end of the war.'

‘Would you mind very much if I took a look?'

‘Of course not. Help yourself.'

She sat down, bouncing Lottie up and down on her knee, while I snapped open the clasps of the case and flicked through them. ‘Paper Doll', ‘In the Mood', ‘How High the Moon', ‘Green Eyes', ‘Deep Purple' . . . I soon found what I was after: same song, same singer.

‘Fantastic old tunes, aren't they?' Jessica said. ‘We still play them sometimes.'

I shut the case and we went out through the French doors onto a lawn shaded by trees and splashed with sunlight.

We watched Jack race across the grass and Lottie toddle unsteadily, the Labrador ambling after them.

‘William's grandparents used to invite the Americans over from the base all the time during the war. They thought it was the least they could do. And then, after the war, they kept in touch with them and preserved the buildings.'

‘Did you ever meet them?'

‘Not the grandfather. He died before I met William, but I knew his grandmother for a year or two before she died. William's father had inherited the farm by then, and she was living in a house in the village, but William took me to see her several times. She was lovely. Very kind, very sympathetic. I'm sure the Americans must have liked her a lot. His father, Peter, was nice too, but not so keen on the idea of preserving the airfield. He was all for selling off the runways and knocking down most of the buildings. The concrete's worth a fortune as hardcore, you see – they use it under motorways – so he had a point. Anyway, he died before anything like that happened and then William took over. His mother went on living here with us but she died, too, last year.'

We progressed upstairs with the children to look at gloriously old-fashioned bedrooms and a nursery with a rocking horse, a Victorian dolls' house, toys made out of wood, and an army of lead soldiers. The bathroom had a claw-footed tub and a lavatory with mahogany seat and a cistern chain with a china handle that said
Pull
. Jessica opened another door at the end of the house.

‘This is the single spare room. Your mother most probably had this one. It's nice and quiet and it has one of the best views.'

The faded wallpaper was roses entwined with honeysuckle. There was a fireplace, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe with a mirror door, a bed with a green silk eiderdown. Jessica opened the window and pointed. ‘You can't see it now, but the old runway's right there – going straight through the middle of the wheatfields. When you came up from Nightingale Lane onto the peri track which way did you turn?'

‘Left. Then I went round until I found a runway and drove down it.'

‘That would have been the main one – this one. There are two short ones that cross it but you probably didn't notice them because they intersect at an angle and the wheat hides them. Of course, during the war there wouldn't have been any crops growing on the airfield – William's grandfather was only allowed to farm outside the perimeter. So it would have been easy to see most of the main runway from this room and the bombers coming and going.'

I helped with the children's bathtime, pushing rubber ducks and boats up and down and blowing soap bubbles and getting wet. It seemed a very long time since I'd done that with Flavia. Jack graciously invited me to read the bedtime story and I was even allowed to choose from among the old books on the nursery shelves. It was a hard decision but, in the end, I went for an old favourite.

‘
Once upon a time there was a poor miller who had one beautiful daughter
 . . .'

William Layton returned soon after the children had gone to sleep. He was a tall, sunburned and clear-eyed young man; I could see at once why the tradition started by his grandfather had been carried on and why the old airfield was in such good hands. He must have been tired after a long day's harvesting but he didn't show it.

‘Did Jess tell you there's a reunion lunch here this weekend? I hope you'll come to it. There'll be more than two hundred Americans who served at Halfpenny Green. And my aunt will be coming, too. She was here in this house all during the war, as a child, so she'll almost certainly remember your mother. You must talk to her. You'll stay to supper now, won't you?'

While Jessica was cooking, he fetched a big aerial photograph of the old airfield and smoothed it out on the kitchen table. ‘Look, you can see the runways very clearly – the main one runs west to east, the cross ones go south-west to north-east and south-east to north-west. Then you've got the peri track going all the way round. Of course, when this photo was taken in 1944, the track was twice the width it is now but my grandfather narrowed it after the war – it took up too much crop space. When the RAF were here they were flying Blenheims and Bostons, then the Americans brought B-17s and put up a whole lot more buildings. There were nearly three thousand Americans serving on the base.'

The sites were marked in ink on the photograph: control tower, technical site, admin, mess, barracks, fuel stores, sick quarters, ammunition dump, bomb dump. He pointed them all out. ‘Some of these were on land requisitioned from other farms. They dispersed everything quite a bit, so it didn't make an easy target. Our farmhouse is here – more or less in the middle of it. Grandfather lost fifty acres but he got it all back after the war.' He smiled at me. ‘After supper, I'll take you on a quick tour, if you like.'

The tour was in an old Jeep that had been given by the appreciative invaders to William's grandfather. The grandson drove it like a Yank and we roared round the airfield on that summer's evening, top down and in great style with the black Labrador in the back, his ears flying. The family had always had black Labradors, William told me. This one, Smut, was six generations down from his grandfather's, called Susie, in a direct line. All given names beginning with S. He showed me inside one or two of the huts, including the old radio shack where there were pin-up paintings on the walls – improbably perfect naked girls in tottering heels, stepping into, or out of, frilly panties.

‘We've done our best to preserve them,' William said. ‘But the winters don't do them much good. Some people think they ought to be moved to a museum, but I think they should stay. This is where they belong, for better or worse.'

We zoomed round the peri track. There were more buildings scattered further afield but they had been left to their fate, overgrown with brambles and nettles and ivy, windows broken – like the Liberator co-pilot's briefing room. It was impossible, William said, to preserve them all. We finished at the control tower and he led the way up the concrete stairway into the flying control room above. It ran the width of the building, windows and balcony overlooking the airfield. The cream and green wall paint had flaked down to the brick in places and all the furniture and equipment had gone, except for a blackboard on the back wall, white lines dividing it into sections. On a small table lay the visitors' book.