Bluebirds (55 page)

The place appalled Winnie – the rows of sick old men, the smell of disinfectant and ether, the ugly green-tiled walls and the harsh lighting, with death lying in wait in the shadows.

‘Ken, do they say you have to stay here? Couldn't you go home? I could look after you. I could get special leave –'

‘The doctor says it's for the best, just for a while. And what you're doin's much more important.'

‘But it isn't, Ken. I'd much sooner look after you, so's you didn't have to be in here.'

‘I won't let you, Winn, and that's that.' His voice was quiet but very firm. ‘I want you to stay with the WAAF. They need you. And you might be able to work with the 'planes one day, just like you said . . . you never know.'

‘They put a notice up the other day, asking for WAAFS to train as flight mechanics.'

She hadn't meant to tell him but it had slipped out.

‘There you are, then. That's wonderful! You goin' to put in for it?'

She shook her head. ‘No, I'm not.'

‘Why ever not? It's what you've always wanted to do.'

‘It'd mean me goin' away for trainin', and I'm not goin' to do that while you're ill. And they might post me anywhere.'

‘Listen, Winnie,' he looked up at her. ‘I'm goin' to go on bein' ill. And I don't want you to miss a chance like that because of me. I want you to put in for it.'

‘No, Ken, I won't. No matter what you say, I won't.'

She stayed until a bell rang for the end of visiting time, somehow keeping up a cheerful front. As she walked away down the ward, she turned to smile and wave and saw Ken lift his hand weakly in reply.

An Army lorry stopped to give her a lift back to camp. She sat up beside the driver who whistled ‘Tipperary' loudly in the darkness of the cab. He seemed in very good humour.

‘Reckon 'itler's 'ad it now, after wot's 'appened. Saved our bloody bacon an' all, if you'll pardon my French.'

‘What do you mean? What's happened?'

‘Blimey, 'aven't you 'eard? It was on the wireless. The Japs attacked the American fleet. Sunk nearly all their ships. Some place called Pearl 'arbour. That means the Yanks'll bloody 'ave to join the war.'

She went home before Christmas. She had never thought of the shop as her home, and still less so now that Ken was not there. To have sat alone with Mrs Jervis would have been miserable. And she could visit Ken just as easily from there. He seemed no better, but no worse. The old man in the next bed had been replaced by another one.

At home all the talk was of the Americans joining the war, and of rumours in the Pig and Whistle that they would be coming over to build aerodromes in England.

‘So long's it's not on my land, I don't mind,' her father had grunted.

He'd been doing quite well from the war lately, she knew. Far better than before it. He'd bought a whole lot more ewes, and a three-furrow plough, and a brand new baler.

Gran wasn't sure where America was, so Winnie fetched an old atlas to show her. She peered at the map.

‘S'posin' there wurnt no wind?'

‘Wind, Gran?'

She jabbed the blue with a sooty finger. ‘Fur crossin' all that sea.'

‘Boats have engines now, Gran. And I expect they'll come in aeroplanes, too. If they can fly all the way across the Atlantic with them.'

‘They speak English?'

‘They learned it from us, Gran. They used to be a colony, remember?'

‘Huh! I furgot. Whoi've they bin waitin' round all this time, then? I'll give 'em a piece o' moi mind when they get here.'

Ken came home for Christmas but he was very weak. Everything had become an effort for him. He only had enough energy to sit in a chair during the day, or to lie on his bed. In February he caught influenza and when he had another serious asthma attack he had to be rushed into hospital again. It had snowed heavily and the roads were bad. By the time that Winnie had managed to get to the hospital he had sunk into unconsciousness. The nurses had pulled screens around his bed and his mother was already sitting beside him, bolt upright on the chair, her hands clasping the black handbag on her lap. She turned her head briefly.

‘You're here at last, then.'

‘I came as soon as I could, Mrs Jervis. I got a lift but the car got stuck in the snow . . .'

‘You're too late, I'd say. He was asking for you a while back. Now he won't even know you're here.'

Winnie fetched another chair and sat on the other side of the bed. She took Ken's hand in hers and it felt cold and lifeless. She kept her eyes on his face, searching in anguish for some sign of awareness. There was none. His eyes remained shut. Once or twice she thought she saw his lips move but when she bent close there was only the rasp of his breathing, and when she spoke his name there was no response at all. When he had asked for her she had not been there and now he had gone beyond her reach. She had failed him when it mattered most.

It snowed all day long, the white flakes falling thickly like goose feathers outside the high window above Ken's bed. Beyond the screens she could hear the sounds from the ward – someone groaning, another calling out feebly for a nurse, the rustle of starched uniforms, the squeaky tread of feet up and down the linoleum.

When it began to get dark the nurses drew the blackout blinds across the windows and switched on the electric lights. Mrs Jervis's face, in shadow, looked carved from stone.

Ken died so quietly that at first they did not even realize that he had gone. He slipped silently away from them into another world. Winnie wept, but Mrs Jervis remained dry-eyed and tight-lipped.

‘He's gone to his rest,' she said, as though to herself. ‘The Lord be thanked for that. He's suffered enough.'

He was buried a few days later in the churchyard at Elmbury, in a grave dug in the cold and snowy ground. Most of the village turned out for the ceremony, shivering in shawls and scarves in a bitter wind.

Afterwards, at the shop, Mrs Jervis said stiffly to Winnie: ‘He'd no money to leave, but I suppose you'll be wanting to take some of his things.'

‘I'd like one of his bird books, if that's all right. And the photograph of him on the mantelpiece. Nothin' else. I'll move my things out.'

There was never any suggestion that she would go on living at the shop with her mother-in-law. Neither of them would have considered the idea. Winnie went up to the bedroom that she and Ken had shared but where they had never been truly man and wife. His Home Guard helmet hung on a hook behind the door and Colonel Foster's pike was still propped in the corner. She looked at them sadly. Poor Ken who had wanted so much to do his bit.

She found the book that she had given him for his eighteenth birthday,
Wild Birds of the British Isles,
which had been his favourite, and put it with her own things in her suitcase. Inside the book she tucked the snapshot of him that she had taken from the mantelpiece. He had pinned the picture of the bearded reedling on the wall close to the bed so that he could look at it while he was lying there.
I saw a whole flock of them this summer . . . When you're better you must go out bird-watchin' again
. He had never gone, and now he never would. He would never see the reed beds again, or hear the wind in the long grasses, or feel the sun warm on his face, or watch the birds flying across the fens . . .

She unpinned the picture, folded it carefully, and put it inside the book with the photo. It was all that she had left of Ken – the book, the photo and the picture. At twenty he was dead and buried. And at twenty she was a widow. She shut the suitcase and went downstairs.

When she returned to RAF Mantleham she put in her application to train as a flight mechanic.

THE WELLINGTON CREW
looked washed out with fatigue and pinched with cold. It was a look that Anne had come to know well over the past months. When a crew came back from ops, it was always the same. They would tramp into the room and slump down in the chairs round the de-briefing table, blinking under the lights and rubbing their reddened eyes. Their hands would clutch at the mugs of hot, rum-laced cocoa and they would light up cigarettes or pipes, and make the odd tired joke or two – if they had any energy left. She would smile at them and laugh at the jokes, and generally behave as though this were a perfectly ordinary interview about something quite mundane, and not an interrogation on the past hours of acute discomfort, deadly danger and horrible fear that they had endured flying in the dark over enemy territory, and somehow survived. She would plough through all the questions that it was her job to ask, and they would be determined to cut it as short as possible so that they could get away to their breakfast eggs and then lie down in blissful sleep and forget all about Hamburg or Münster or Wilhelmshaven, or wherever they had been that night.

She looked down at the form on the table in front of her and the six men yawned and fidgeted as she went through the list. Yes, they'd dropped their bombs bang on the primary target; yes, the weather over the target had been clear – for once; and yes, they had been attacked by enemy fighters.

‘Can you tell me about that?'

The Wimpey's skipper massaged both his ears. He was still partly deaf from the noise of the engines and under
the glare of the electric light his face looked ashen. There were black rubber marks on his cheeks from the oxygen mask and a red soreness round his mouth. His Irvin jacket collar was turned up about his neck; beneath it a dingy white polo-neck sweater. He was thawing out slowly.

‘Couple of them jumped us when we were crossing the Dutch coast coming back. Near Leiden. We were hit in the starboard wing. Nothing too serious, luckily. Jock thinks he got one of them, don't you, Jock?'

The tail gunner took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Aye. I saw one engine on fire and he was going down. I'm not too sure if it was a 110 or a JU88. I didn't get a good enough look. The other laddie pushed off.'

The pilot said: ‘Bags of flak, as usual. Some of it where there wasn't supposed to be any.'

She pushed the map across the table. ‘Can you show me where exactly?'

The interrogation went on. Had they seen any other enemy fighters? What about searchlights? Was there anything special or unusual about the enemy anti-aircraft defences? Had they noticed any lights on the ground? Had they seen any other aircraft go down?

‘The kite behind us went down in flames,' the skipper said laconically, scratching his head.

She wrote down all the details painstakingly. Sometimes, when the answers came too pat from a crew, she had the suspicion that they had agreed earlier between themselves what they were going to say so that they could get the de-briefing over quickly. When she had finished they stood up with relief, scraping their chairs. The navigator stumbled groggily. Their average age, she supposed, was about twenty: the same age as herself. She did not think that she would have the courage to do what they did.

The skipper came round to her as she was collecting her papers together.

‘Any news of Digger yet?'

She shook her head. ‘Nothing so far, Mike. Sorry.'

He nodded and turned away.

Digger was the skipper of A-Apple, one of the two Wellington bombers that had so far failed to return from the night's operation. Its crew was entirely made up of men from the Commonwealth – Digger and another Australian, two New Zealanders, a Rhodesian and a Canadian.

Anne had sat in on the briefing the day before. The crews, as always, had been confined to camp all day and any communication with the outside world forbidden. The briefing room was kept locked and guarded until the time came for them to troop in. The window blinds were drawn and a curtain concealed the big wall map on the stage at the end of the room. The crews always sat together at the long tables, chatting idly while they waited for the show to start – like an audience in the stalls of a theatre. Different ranks, different types, different backgrounds, different nationalities and from all kinds of schools and jobs and professions – but bonded together in a small, special unit where none of those differences counted and the only thing that mattered was their loyalty to each other. They were like links forged into a circular chain, each dependent on the rest for its whole strength. Some crews were good, and some were not so good. Some were lucky and rarely saw any flak, whereas others were not so lucky and always seemed to catch it. Some flew a tour of ops completely unscathed and others invariably returned with their aircraft holed like a sieve. The really unlucky ones didn't return at all. Some arrived at the station one day and were reported missing the next, before they'd had time to unpack. Sometimes a crew's luck simply ran out. Occasionally she had a premonition that they were fated and was proved right.

There had been twenty crews in the briefing room and the usual tension in the air, in spite of the casual chit-chat, while they waited for the Station Commander and the squadron COs to arrive. That was the signal for the curtain to be drawn back and allow them to see the
red tape pinned across the map to the target and back. Essen. There had been an audible collective intake of breath. The Ruhr. Happy Valley. Heavy enemy defences. Coning searchlights. Walls of flak. Swarms of night fighters. She had seen it all in their faces beneath the grey haze of tobacco smoke that hung over them like a pall, and she had wondered, as she often did, which of them would not return. Which ones, come the morning, would be there to eat their operational eggs and bacon, and which would not? Digger had caught her eye and grinned; his luck had held so far, cross fingers. It was more likely to be the sprog crew she had noticed sitting at the back and studiously taking notes. Their inexperience, plus being stuck with the worst aircraft as new boys, saw to that, and everyone always said that the first three ops were the riskiest. Their skipper looked about nineteen and she had been able to tell, even from a quick glance at a distance, that he was desperately nervous. Or, maybe it would be the crew of C-Charlie with the spare bod in place of a sick gunner – that was supposed to be unlucky.