Sentimental Journey (24 page)

When Skip was flying his Spit and saw someone killed, a comrade or the enemy, he felt like that lone bird, circling high in the sky, still alive but understanding that someone else just like him no longer lived. He never told Greer how he was so very relieved whenever he saw an enemy parachute. He didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t tell her that when he made a kill, he inevitably flew back to base and emptied his stomach the moment his feet hit solid ground.

He saw that other flyers came back with a dulled look on their faces. The energetic, anxious, and bright glow they’d had before all this started had promptly disappeared from their eyes as surely as if someone had killed it. The Brylcreem boys weren’t so bright and glossy anymore.

War did that to a man, changed you whether you were on the right side or not. Your basic beliefs were tested. You did what you had to do, but war played havoc with your values and your internal barometres of morality, with what was right, and what was wrong. War turned everything on its ear. He could see that in all the men of No. 77 Squadron. Innocence lost to the fact that they had to kill or be killed.

There were long nights when he would lie in his cot in the barracks and think that he wanted to turn in his wings and walk away. Duty and pride wouldn’t let him. There was immense irony in the fact that all he really ever wanted to do was fly a plane. He had thought in his youthful naïveté that the Royal Air Force was his path to glory. When they plotted and planned and flew maneuvers, they used the term “kills” and talked about “aces” and “dogfights.” But that was only talk, words with no experience attached to them.

Now he was shooting men out of the sky, because he had no choice.

“Look here!” Hemmings waved a newspaper at the room in general.

“Hold the bloody thing still so we can see it.” Mallory tried to grab the paper.

Hemmings stopped waving it, folded it back, and held it up.

There was a huge cartoon that covered the entire page; it was of a giant RAF pilot standing in the clouds, pulling Luftwaffe planes out of the air like King Kong. Beneath was the caption: HORATIUS OF THE SKIES.

A cheer went up in the room.

“There’s a quote here from the PM,” Hemmings added.

“Read it!”

Hemmings looked down and read, “Today Churchill voiced what the nation is feeling at the heroism and valor of the British Royal Air Force. Said the PM, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many . . . to so few.’”

There was a long moment of silence as the PM’s words and meaning hit every single man in the room.

Mallory took a hit off his fag and said casually, “He must be talking about our pub bills.”

At that, everyone laughed. It felt damn good to laugh. And for some flyers the joke was true. A noggin or two of beer, a gin or a scotch or single malt was the only way they could find the courage to go up again the next day, day in and day out, week after bloody week, facing repeated waves of the Luftwaffe. Others needed to drink themselves to sleep, to knock back shot after shot of hard liquor until they were numb enough to sleep.

The door to the dispersal hut opened and the flight commander came inside. Skip waited for the inevitable words, “Scramble men! Scramble!”

But there was no panicked order, just a long, drawn-out pause from their squadron leader.

“No. 55 just came in by truck to relieve you. No. 77 has a forty-eight effective at fifteen hundred.”

The clock on the wall said eleven hundred. The official start of leave was still four hours away.

The others turned away from the clock and began to grumble and mutter. Some cursed. Even Mallory, who seldom showed anything close to a human emotion, threw his cards down on the table. One chap in the corner stood up, clearly ready to go at it with whomever he could find.

The CO began to laugh. “You should leave now, unless some of you are dead keen on waiting four lousy hours.”

Books slammed closed. Newspapers drifted to the ground. Chair legs scraped the floor. Someone tossed a king of hearts into the air, the pool of fifty pounds quickly abandoned. It wasn’t long before most of No. 77 Squadron had gathered around the train station near Wellingham, talking, smoking, and waiting for the trains. The men were off in different directions: some into the arms of a sweetheart, some towards a huge serving of Mum’s flaky pastry and a good night’s sleep in their own feather beds, while others went to Piccadilly and more rackety entertainment, the kind that came in the form of noisy pubs, London’s Follies
Bergère
, or the Windmill Theatre with its tall and buxom girls who wore military hats and little else.

Not a single man who stood there was aware that at the exact same moment the next train squealed its way into the small, rural station, air-raid sirens in a crumbled and smoldering London began to sound the all clear.

“HEAVEN CAN WAIT”

“Mrs. Inskip, can you hear me?”

Someone was calling her. The words dragged out slowly and were indistinguishable, as if they were coming from a broken gramophone. She didn’t know who it was. She couldn’t understand them. She wanted to ask, “What?” She could think the word, but she couldn’t speak it. There was something in her throat. She could not speak around it. When she tried to take a breath, everything smelled charred, like the autumn air of Keighley the morning after the October bonfires.

“Mrs. Inskip? Can you hear me?”

Of course I can hear you!

“If you can hear me, raise your hand or open your eyes. Give us a signal.”

She tried. She couldn’t open her eyes, because she couldn’t feel them. She couldn’t feel much of anything. The edges of her world were as misty as the
Thames
in winter.

Raise my hand. He said to raise my hand.

She raised her hand.

“Still nothing,” the man said on a half sigh.

I’m lifting my hand. Look!

“There is no sign from her. She cannot hear me.”

I
can hear you!

She lifted her hand again.

Blast it all! Why did they not see it? Pay attention!

Someone tapped her on the bottom of her foot.

I feel it! I can feel it!

“There is still no response.”

Yes, there is, you damned fool!

She could hear the scratching sound of someone scribbling with a pen on paper, then a woman’s voice. “Such a shame.”

What is a shame?

“I’ll come back this evening and check on her, nurse. Keep her as comfortable as possible. I’ve reduced the morphine.”

Morphine? My God . . .

“Perhaps lowering the medication will bring her around. Let me know if there’s any change.”

“They’re bringing in more injured, Dr. Falconer.” A new voice, a woman’s voice, came from a distance.

“I’ll be along momentarily.”

Wait! Wait! I can hear you!

She heard his footsteps going away, the tap-tap-tap of his shoes.

Come back! I am here! I can hear you! See my hand? Aren’t I lifting my hand? I can feel it! Come back! Don’t leave. Please don’t leave me
 . . .

She could feel tears slide from the corners of her eyes and curl behind her ears as if they were only the reading spectacles she put on every day and not the frustration and pain that was spilling out of her. She tried to move, tried to sit up, but something sharp and jagged shot like fiery knives through her whole skull. It hurt so much the world disappeared into nothing but black, hollow silence.

“MAKE BELIEVE
ISLAND
”

There were no taxis, so Skip had to go on foot from the train station. He didn’t walk. He ran, sidestepping the bricks, wood, debris, and broken glass in the streets, alleys, and walks. His musette bag was slung over a shoulder, where it bounced heavily on his upper back like some huge hand that was shoving him towards home. He took a shortcut through the park, which wasn’t crowded. Silver barrage balloons flew like toy dirigibles over the greens. Soot coated everything from the grass to the hedgerows, and a fog of smoke lingered in the lower branches of the old trees.

There was a huge black hole in the ground where a park bench and fountain used to be. Pieces of shattered marble and cement peppered the neighboring ground. Nearby shade trees, once wide and broad, had been splintered by the blast of the same German bomb.

Skip came out of the park running, scared by what he saw and more afraid of what he might see. He skirted the knot of fire trucks that were busy pumping water where incendiaries had fallen and spread fire in random, destructive patches for a whole city block.

His heart racing, he turned onto a street a few blocks from his house and stopped suddenly.

There was no damage here. It was postcard perfect—giving a surreal sense of walking into another dimension. The trees planted leisurely along the walks still wore their yellowed leaves. The town-houses themselves bore not even a fingerprint of the war. Not a cracked window. Nothing.

He looked back over his shoulder, wondering for an instant if he’d had so much combat that he looked for destruction and danger when there was none.

He was so much relieved he could feel his eyes tearing as he walked briskly toward home. He took deep breaths as he walked. Experience had taught him that breathing helped to stop the crying. There were moments in his plane when he escaped a near hit or a chase that he would
realise
there were tears streaming from his eyes.

It was a fact of war: men were frightened and men cried.

He rounded the street corner. He was running again, searching for No. 27.

And there it was. The iron grate at the base of the steps. The lacquered black door. The polished brass numbers. Two. Seven. Unharmed.

He stopped he was so relieved, a hand over his damp eyes.

All was untouched. All was perfect.

He took a few more breaths. A sparrow was chirping loudly from above. He would have to get the nest from the eaves or the little buggers would wake him at a ghastly early hour.

He looked up.

The top three floors and the roof of No. 27 were blown completely away.

“FOOLS
RUSH
IN”

It was sheer chaos at the entrance to the hospital. Everyone was talking at once. There was only a narrow set of doors where people were sandwiched together, trying to wedge inside. Skip ran around to an alley entrance where an ambulance was wheeling in someone. He walked up to the front desk.

A nurse was thumbing through a stack of papers and clipboards.

“Please.” Skip could hardly speak he was so out of breath. “I’m looking for a Mrs. Inskip.” He braced his hands on the desk in front of him, hung his head, panting. “The Home Guard sent me here. My wife was brought in about three, perhaps four hours ago.”

The nurse at the small desk began checking a list. She picked up a second list and looked up. “I’m sorry. We have so few come in with names. The casualties have been flooding the place for three days now. But today is the worst of it. The good news is they just found a girl who had been buried under rubble for almost a hundred hours. A hundred hours. Can you imagine?” She shook her head in disbelief and went back to scanning the list. “Here she is. Inskip. Ward three, second floor. Take those stairs.”