I'll Be Seeing You (22 page)

The season of goodwill didn't stop any missions; they flew them just the same. Hanover, Brussels, Paris, Chartres – dropping leaflets. They were the easy ones: the pieces of cake. Then back to Bremen again for another stab at the U-boats, dropping bombs instead of paper, and to Münster and to Ludwigshafen. Those were the tough ones.
Miss Laid
was out of action being patched up, so they took another Fort with somewhat better manners. Ray, his new co-pilot, was a decent guy but he wasn't as good. He missed Gene by his side in the cockpit, the way they'd worked together.

1943 turned into 1944. The Allies had landed at Anzio, north of Rome, and were having a hell of a tough time from the sound of it. In England, it stopped raining for a while and snowed instead and then it froze. Everything froze: water, mud, people, planes. Their twenty-first mission was to Caen in France. Twenty-one, as Don reminded him unnecessarily on the way out to their morning rendezvous with a newly patched-up
Miss Laid
, was getting close to the finishing post. Get through this one and they'd be on the home straight. At the hardstand one of the armourers wanted to take a photo of them. Waiting around while he did it froze their asses off, but they obliged. Hell, they even smiled, though they'd have been smiling a lot more if the guy had waited to take it when they got back. They took off into an overcast sky – nothing new in that – and into what the weather crystal-gazer had called snow flurries, which
was
a novelty. He'd never heard of them but he was soon getting acquainted.
Miss Laid
was in a bad mood and he didn't blame her. She was probably remembering what had happened last time he'd taken her out.

The enemy fighters left them in peace for once, but as soon as they hit the French coast the flak started: puffy black Jerry smoke signals sent up to greet them on the target approach.
Welcome to Germany. Come on, you guys. This way
. He'd seen a lot worse on other missions, but somehow he had a bad feeling about this one.

Daisy had seen them leave from her bedroom window. The night before she'd gone to bed with a headache and sore throat and had woken up feeling much worse. She'd heard the bombers starting up and then begin to taxi round the peri track, and hauled herself out of bed to watch. The runway had been swept but snow lay over the rest of the airfield. As the first bomber had begun its take-off run, she had opened the window wide to hear and see better. Oblivious of the bitter cold, she had watched each take-off, counting them.
Miss Laid
was the sixth. The Flying Fortress with the languorous beauty painted on her port side – Ham's side – had raced along the runway, engines bellowing. Daisy had seen her wheels bounce a little and then leave the earth and she'd watched her clamber slowly into the sky, higher and higher, smaller and smaller, until she had vanished into cloud.

She had gone back to bed and buried herself under the green silk eiderdown, still counting as each bomber took off. Twenty. Not so many as on the big raids. Probably somewhere in France: one of the easier ones.

When the Forts returned, she awoke instantly from a fitful sleep and dragged herself out of bed again. The bombers were circling the airfield and began coming in to land. She counted carefully. One, two, three . . . six, seven, eight . . . eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
Eighteen
. That was all. And none of them had been
Miss Laid
. She waited for the other two, listening hard for the sound of more engines. Waiting and listening. More than an hour later, Mrs Layton found her collapsed by the open window.

He hid in the wood until it was dark. At the base, they'd been given a lecture on what to do if they landed in enemy territory. Some guy who'd bailed out over France and made his way down to Spain and back to England had given them some helpful tips, and he tried to remember them. A French family caught helping an escaped American or British airman would get shot, so don't go approaching them. Head for the nearest wood. Wait until dark, then move off as far away as possible from search patrols. Find a remote village. Watch it for signs of Germans, then, if there aren't any, walk through the place without speaking to anyone. Let the French make the first move. There'd been other helpful hints too from instructors, about how to land without breaking your legs, how not to get towed along by the chute like a fish on a line, how to get rid of it fast, and how to hide it.

He'd landed more or less OK, shed the chute OK and there was a wood close by where he'd stuffed it well out of sight under some leaves. All OK, except that he was bleeding badly from a big gash in his leg. He'd taken a look at the wound and seen it was ugly. He'd no idea how it had happened. No real idea how he'd got out. He'd been lucky, and luckier still that he hadn't been barbecued in the process. All he could remember was
Miss Laid
getting hit by flak and bursting into flames. One moment they'd been flying along, the next the wings were streaming fire, the cockpit was full of flames and they were corkscrewing down through space. He and Ray had fought their way to the hatch and the copilot had gone first. There'd been no chance to help any of the other guys, no chance at all, and he didn't know what had happened to them. All he could remember was the roaring crackle, the searing heat of the flames, and, he thought, the sound of screaming which might have been himself. He'd been falling right alongside
Miss Laid
, faithful to her to the end, and then there'd been a mighty jerk as the chute opened up. He'd seen another Fort passing overhead – spotted the big black and red Mickey Mouse painted on its nose: Joe Bronsky and his crew going by. He'd thought, they'll have been looking out for chutes so they'll know some of us got out OK. Daisy'll know there's a chance.

Daisy lay in bed upstairs at the farmhouse. She could hear voices and laughter from the sitting room downstairs – the crews had come over as usual. They'd be playing cards, chess, backgammon, putting on records. The door must be open because she could hear each record, in turn, quite clearly: ‘Green Eyes', ‘Paper Doll', ‘Moonlight Serenade', ‘I'll be Seeing You'.

He spent that night in the wood and the next day considering his options. Option one, he could stay there for a while and hope the leg got better. Not such a great idea. The temperature was well below freezing and the wound was giving him hell; soon he wouldn't be able to use it at all to go in search of any villages, remote or otherwise. The only sign of human habitation he'd spotted so far was a lone farmhouse maybe a mile or so from the wood, down in a valley among some orchards. A farm meant a barn and a barn usually meant hay, or straw, some kind of shelter and a place to hide up. That was option two and he liked it a whole lot better. He ate the chocolate from his escape kit, saving the Horlicks tablets. Later, when it was almost dark, he swallowed a Benzedrine tablet before he set off slowly and painfully across the fields, dragging his injured leg and leaving a spotted trail of blood across the frozen earth.

It took him over an hour to reach the farm. By that time the moon was up and he could make out the silhouette of the house and a walled yard, with the expected barn at one end. It was a rundown, poor sort of place; he could tell that from the stink of a midden, from the encrusted dirt under his feet, and from the way the barn door, pegged shut by a nail through a hasp, was hanging crookedly by one hinge. Inside, there was another smell – the pungent aroma of chickens; he could hear them clucking around in the darkness and the nervous flutter and flap of wing feathers at his entrance. When he flicked on his Zippo lighter and moved the flame around there was a whole lot more clucking and chicken eyes staring back at him, heads poking nervously this way and that.

An old ladder led up into a loft. He managed to pull himself up it, rung by rung, and rolled sideways onto the flooring above. As he had hoped there was hay – hay that was old and musty but soft to lie on and good to hide in. He crawled into a corner and covered himself up.

The hens woke him at daylight; they were moving about below, yacking among themselves like a bunch of old women. Presently, he heard the sound of the nail being pulled back through the hasp and the crooked door being heaved open, and then a young girl's voice, clear and high, speaking to the hens in French. He lay there listening. The wound in his leg was a throbbing, fiery pit of pain and he knew that he was in bad trouble. There was no question of him holing up for a day or two and then scampering over the fields and far away. No question, right now, of even getting to his feet and walking anywhere at all. He dragged himself by his elbows across the hayloft to the top of the ladder and peered down. The girl was feeding the hens – throwing handfuls of meal out of a tin bowl onto the barn floor, scattering it wide as though she was sowing biblical seeds, and the hens were running around, pecking away like crazy. She was about ten or twelve, he judged, and dressed in a threadbare wool coat with a scarf tied, peasant fashion, round her hair and old-fashioned laced-up boots on her feet.

He debated what to do, and, as he did so, some basic instinct must have made her look upwards towards the loft. She saw him. Her mouth gaped and her face froze with shock and terror. Christ, what the hell was the French for don't be frightened . . . He said quickly,
‘Je suis américain. Pilote. Pas dangereux. Je suis blessé.'

She dropped the bowl with a loud clatter and ran out of the barn. The hens scattered and then regrouped, resuming their feeding frenzy.

Influenza turned into pneumonia and Daisy was moved to the base hospital, in a room at the end of a ward. She was on the critical list for several days, unaware of her parents visiting, unaware of anything much at all. When she was off the danger list, Flight Lieutenant Dimmock came to see her; he – ignored the rules and sat on the end of her bed, pipe in hand. His face, as usual, told her nothing.

She said at once, ‘Is there any news, Sandy?'

‘Nothing very good, I'm afraid. Awfully sorry.'

‘Tell me what happened.'

‘Are you sure you want to know?'

‘Quite sure.'

He fiddled with the pipe, peering into the bowl, poking at it with the end of a matchstick. ‘Hamilton's plane was hit by flak soon after they crossed the French coast and was seen going down in flames. No parachutes spotted, unfortunately.'

‘That doesn't necessarily mean—'

‘I'm afraid it does in this case, Daisy. Some Intelligence chap in France sent a message across. Apparently, the wreckage was found on the ground by the French Resistance people before the Germans got there, and it's been definitely identified. No survivors.'

‘The crew? Were they all identified?'

He blew carefully down the pipe's stem. ‘Tricky that. Not a whole lot left, apparently. If you see what I mean.'

She saw only too well. She'd been to such funerals.

He went on, ‘Usual procedure for that sort of case, I imagine. The crew buried together in one grave. The Germans are pretty good about doing it all decently, one gathers. Proper respect, and so on. Another Fort bought it that day, too. Joe Bronsky's lot. Remember him?'

Yes, she remembered him. Dallas, Texas. Big D. Nice Joe. He was a regular at the farmhouse evenings, showing the family snaps, telling her all about his home and the Lone Star State. The other plane missing must have been Joe's.

Sandy fished in his pocket. ‘I got this for you. They were clearing out Hamilton's stuff to send back to his next of kin, and I palmed it when nobody was looking. Against all the regs, of course, but I thought you'd like to have something of his.'

It was the sketchbook that Ham had showed her. The pencil drawings he'd made of life on the base, with some additions that she'd never seen – including one, near the end, of her sitting at her table in the Interrogation hut. She hadn't even known that he'd done it. She closed the book.

‘Thank you, Sandy. And for coming to tell me.'

‘Least I could do.' He put his pipe away in his pocket and stood up. He turned at the doorway. ‘It's not much comfort, of course, Daisy, but it. must happen so damn fast, I doubt they ever know much about it. I've always believed that.'

When he'd gone, she lay staring at the ceiling. She wished that she had died too.

An American nurse came breezing in, all bright and smiling. ‘Some guy just asked me to give you this. He didn't say his name. Hey, let me plump up those pillows for you.'

She was made to sit up, the pillows pummelled, the sheets retucked, an envelope put in her hand. When the nurse had left the room she opened it. Inside, there was a photograph of Ham and his crew. They were grouped on the starboard side – the side without the painting of
Miss Laid
. There was snow on the ground and they were wearing heavy winter flying kit. She realized that it had probably been taken just before they had left on their last mission. In their final hours. He was standing at the end of the back row, fisted hands on hips, heavy sheepskin collar turned up, the brim of his cap pulled down so that only a part of his face was visible – the middle part. She could see just his eyes, his nose and his mouth – the corners curved in the smile that she knew so well.

The French doctor was an elderly man and had difficulty getting up the ladder into the hayloft. He had brought his bag up too and proceeded to examine Hamilton's leg, poking and prodding. His English wasn't great but his meaning was crystal clear.

‘Not good, my friend. Very bad. Hospital is necessary, but also now impossible. The Germans will know this family has helped you. They shoot them. Perhaps me too.'

The wound was agony after all the prodding. ‘If I could walk, I'd go.'

‘Of course . . . but it is much time before you walk. So, here you must stay. I will do my best but I promise nothing. Perhaps I cannot save the leg. Or you.'