Lost in the Flames (14 page)

‘If these men are good enough to fly with me, then they’re good enough to eat with me too,’ he told the waitress as her intonation and her eyebrows queried his presence.

When they had finished and the mess hall was thinning out and their usual waitress came to take away their plates and cups, Don asked if she would sit with them a while.

‘I can’t remember the last time I sat and ate with a woman,’ he said in mock desolation.

She was a pleasant-looking girl with auburn hair tied up in a bun and fine dark eyebrows that lifted slightly at his suggestion.

‘But you’ve finished eating already,’ she replied.

‘Oh please, Millie,’ said Don. ‘Just for a minute or two.’

Millie sat down and they laughed and joked about an incident she recounted regarding a tray of eggs and a slab of lard and a tumble that someone had taken the previous day. The sun streamed in through the windows and lit up the grain of the table and Jacob noticed how fine and white Millie’s skin looked against the golden brown of the oak and he saw that Don had noticed it too, that his hand moved a touch as if he wanted to take her hand in his own and hold it to his cheek, but instead Don made another joke and everyone laughed and she held her fine white hand to her mouth as she giggled and her eyes smiled at Don. As they stood up to leave, Don lingered at the table with Millie until finally he followed the others over to a grassy bank in the sun near the first of the Nissen huts. He lay down beside them and plucked a daisy from its stalk and began counting off the petals, ‘She loves me, she loves me not …’ and Jim laughed and George called him a soft bugger and Jacob frowned.

‘Don, you don’t want to go messing with Millie,’ Jacob said.

‘Whyever not?’ said Don, ‘Didn’t you see her eyes, the way she was looking at me, like I was a cream bun or something and she wanted to swallow me whole?’

‘My dear Don, you have a rather fevered imagination,’ said Ralph.

‘Really, skip, a cream bun I was, I swear it. I saw it clear as day.’

‘I saw it too,’ said Jacob. ‘That’s what I’m worried about. Don’t you know she’s a chop girl?’

‘Come on mate,’ said Don. ‘You don’t believe that superstitious claptrap, do you?’

‘Seriously,’ said Jacob. ‘Stratton was dicing with her and his whole crew bought it the very next night.’

‘Jacob’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘And before that there was that other fellow, you know the big Canadian guy, and the same damn thing happened, gone for a Burton the very next trip. Cream bun one day, toast the next.’

‘Well it’s a bit late now,’ said Don. ‘I’ve agreed to meet her for the
bus into town this evening.

‘For Christ’s sake, Don,’ said Jacob. ‘Don’t risk it. It’s not just your neck that’s on the block if you get the chop. We’ll all be going down with you.’

They fell into silence and then Ralph spoke.

‘Well, as skipper, I’m responsible for the safety of this crew, and I say that it’s perfectly all right for you to see Millie this evening. However, you will need a chaperone to ensure you don’t get up to anything with which the crew would not approve. So we’ll all be going out with you. There can’t be any harm in her drinking with us, just as long as it doesn’t go any further than that.’

‘Skip, I’d have invited you all to drink with us anyway,’ laughed Don.

They met at the gate that evening and Millie arrived and they all got on the bus, a crowd of aircrew and WAAFs, and the bus hurtled out of the gate. The windows were open and the warm evening air rushed in and cast Millie’s hair about her face and Jacob saw her looking at Don from beneath her auburn curls and Don looking back and smiling the smile of a man who knows he has been condemned and that his end is probably near, whether it be just around the corner of the next day or two weeks down the line or maybe three. Jacob watched as Don leaned his head out of the window and the wind swept over him and Don closed his eyes as the dipping sun brushed his face with gold, and then the rush of wind was interrupted and Don was opening his eyes again and Millie was leaning her head out too and was looking back at him, her face right up close to his, and Jacob thought of Rose and those times he had felt her soft breath on his face as she spoke, and then another song started up within the crowded bus, a raucous cacophony of voices bellowing out their sense of how good it felt still to be alive. The bus screeched to a halt in the nearest village and a handful of aircrew and WAAFs who had left the camp earlier to sneak in a preliminary pint squeezed on board and the doors closed and the driver gunned the engine and the hedges sped by again in a blur. They got off in the centre of town and streamed into the hotel across the road and soon the room was alive with the sound of voices and laughter and singing, the airmen in their best blue and the WAAFs in their severe, tight-fitting uniforms. The landlord lined the pint jugs up on the bar and filled them continuously and the bar never emptied and someone
began playing a piano and Jacob looked across and saw that it was George and the singing started again and a little space cleared in the middle of the room where couples paired up and waltzed in time to George’s dancing fingers and the tremulous warble of a Welsh flight-sergeant singing something that sounded entirely improvised in his native tongue, and then a more familiar song began and three dozen voices joined in, ‘And the gunner in his turret, has got no fucking room! But he’s got more room in there than in his fucking tomb!’

‘They’re singing about us,’ said Jim, grinning at Don.

‘To hell with that,’ said Don. ‘Here, get some more sauce down you,’ and he pushed another pint into Jim’s hand. ‘No point in saving our money. We’re not going to live long enough to spend it anyway.’

‘Come on Donald, let’s go and dance,’ said Millie, and she took his hand and Don passed his glass to Jacob and winked as he followed her over to the space in the middle of the room.

‘You don’t really believe all that bull about chop girls, do you mate?’ asked Jim.

‘You can’t be too careful,’ said Jacob.

‘Do you have a sweetheart at home, Jacob?’

‘Of sorts. Reason enough to get through this war.’

‘Well you should get stuck in here anyway, mate. You never know when you’ll get another chance.’

He nodded over towards the other side of the room where Ralph and Charlie were with a group of WAAFs, Ralph talking vigorously as Charlie stared with his owl’s eyes and smiled at something surprising he had heard.

‘Come on Jacob,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s have a wander over there.’

As they were walking across, Hairy Mary appeared in a flurry of red hair beside Jacob and slipped her arm through his and led him away to the dance floor, and he followed her reluctantly and held her politely but not intimately and he felt the occasional tug, a suggestion, as she tried to draw him in. The crowd thinned towards closing time and when the shutters came down the streets rang with shouts and singing. The bus drew up and they crowded in and a dim blue light lit the interior and the night air was still warm and humid and their bodies pressed together in a bobbing, sweating mass that swayed with the motion of the vehicle as it sped around the bends out of town, the songs that spilled from the speeding windows frightening the rabbits
off the verges and into the hedgerows.

‘You’re all right, you are,’ Hairy Mary shouted into Jacob’s ear, and she took his head in her hands and planted a vigorous kiss upon his cheek and he put his arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder and it bobbed up and down as the bus flung itself in and out of pot-holes. Beside him, Jacob watched as Don and Millie thrust their heads out of the window again and they grinned at each other as the wind sped through their hair and the moon cast the shadows of trees across the road. At the gate Don and Millie hung behind the others and by the guard house they stopped and gently kissed as Jacob looked back.

‘Hey Don!’ Jacob called out. ‘I meant what I said. I don’t want to get the chop on account of your knob.’

Don lingered, then turned and kissed Millie goodnight and ran to catch up with the others.

The next day ops were off again and Don and Millie met in the evening and walked down the lanes to the village pub where they sat and talked and imagined they were living a normal life again, a life in which people could meet and fall in love and contemplate a future unfettered by urgency or the need to cram experience into days or weeks not years, lest the years should never come. They walked back to the camp, the moon rising behind the woods, and they embraced in the empty country lane and they kissed in defiance of whatever the future might wish for them.

The following night the engines started up again towards dusk, gunning up the night with their roar, sweeping away the memories of quiet days. Ops were on and the target was Hamburg again. D-Dog shook as Ralph held the throttle at the runway’s end, then the brakes came off and the Dog sped off into the deepening void as Millie stood with the others by the runway and watched the planes soar away until they were barely audible specks turning east. Then a bank of cloud swallowed them up and they existed no more and England existed no more for them, and all they knew was their hurtling crying machine and the song of the engines and the disembodied voices of their comrades over the intercom as the air turned cool and damp in the cloud. They emerged
from the cloud into twilight, the first stars flickering on the threshold of night and the sun lighting up the top of the cloud layer with streaks of pinkish-orange cut through by blue-grey valleys. Away to one side Jacob saw another Lancaster lift up through the cloud, then another directly beneath them and another to starboard, and all across the sky the bombers crept up like beautiful black insects into the amphitheatre of the sky, huge and empty and wonderful, a place where only gods by rights should be. But a devil of a storm was stoking itself over Europe and they ran into it as soon as they crossed the enemy coast, the crack and flash from the flak-ships blanked out by the storm clouds. Rain sheeted through the sky, thrashing upon the dome where Jacob lay prone, a million rushing drops lit for brief instants by lightning bolts, and the thunder rose above the din of the engines and Ralph took the plane up but the storm was insurmountable, and he dropped the altitude but the storm could not be under-flown, and so they flew on through cloud in a sky thick with bombers, all attempting to avoid each other in the storm and the flak that was beginning to pock the sky. A huge flash of white tinged with orange and the bright red of flares erupted overhead and debris struck the Dog and she shuddered and flew on until the intensifying red bursts of flak and the smell of cordite and the faint orange glow through the cloud signalled their arrival over the target and Jacob bombed on the parachute flares through 10/10ths cloud and Ralph banked away onto the course for home. They cleared the storm thirty minutes out from the target and the night-fighters were waiting, picking off the bombers as they flew into the clear air, silhouetted against the lightning bursts and the flames of the city that had died.

Suddenly Jacob heard Don yelling down the intercom, ‘Corkscrew port, go!’ and a dark shape scudded by below, and the Dog dived away and she shook with the dull clatter of her guns as tracer fire from the fighter zipped past Jacob’s dome, and then the smacking sound of cannon shells hitting into her somewhere unseen.

‘Corkscrew starboard, go!’ Jim was screaming now, then a long burst of fire and the Dog falling away again.

‘I’ve got him!’ someone was shouting down the intercom, and in the nose of the bomber Jacob saw the fighter trail away in a torrent of flame and he followed it down until a silent little blink upon the surface of the earth indicated its impact with the ground.

Then Ralph’s voice, ‘Rear gunner, what’s happening back there? Rear gunner, I said what’s going on? OK, radio op, back you go, go take a look.’

Then silence for several minutes, that burning back in Jacob’s throat again, and then the sound of an intercom switch and George’s voice, chucking up an oath.

‘Radio op, what’s up?’ said Ralph, then a stream of oaths coming back the other way. ‘Hey George, what the hell is it?’

‘Leave it, skip,’ said Charlie. ‘He doesn’t feel like talking just now.’

‘I told you she was a bloody chop girl,’ said Jacob.

‘Bomb-aimer, maintain silence, will you?’ said Ralph. ‘And that’s a bloody order.’

They landed as the first smudge of light smeared the eastern sky and they left the aircraft through the door beside the rear turret and in the half-light they could barely see what was left of Don and his guns, just a shape against the dawn, a shape that was not as it should have been. Then Jim was outside, peering into the turret, reaching in and pulling at something, then Jacob pulling at his arm, tugging him towards the truck.

‘Come on, mate. You can’t do anything for him now.’

‘But we can’t just leave him here, we have to get him out.’

Then Ralph was at Jacob’s shoulder, pushing past him and pulling Jim away, and then six silent men were sitting in the truck as it bumped across the field, and they were in the debriefing room as Don’s broken body was disentangled from the turret piece by piece, and at breakfast Jacob heard that they had hosed out what was left of him onto the grass in a stream of blood and bone and brain.

When Millie approached them in the mess they consoled her as well as they could, from a distance.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, looking at Jacob. ‘I’m a chop girl. Don’t you worry, I’ll keep away from you all now. I’ll keep well clear until all this is over.’

And she burst into tears and hurried off into the kitchen.

‘See what you’ve gone and done,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ve upset her good and proper now.’

‘I’m not too fussed about that,’ said Jacob. ‘Just as long as she steers clear, that’s all.’

Jacob noticed the ripples across the surface of Ralph’s tea as the
skipper’s hands trembled almost imperceptibly.

‘Jacob’s right,’ said George. ‘No more chop girls, boys, or you’re out on your ear. Right, skip?’

Ralph nodded slowly and he put his mug on the table to stop the shaking, but he knew Jacob had seen it, he had seen Jacob looking.