I'll Be Seeing You (16 page)

For the first couple of weeks they'd learned the routine and collected yet more bruises in the blackout, walking into walls, tripping over kerbs and falling down steps before they'd finally gotten used to it. When they started flying they did practice missions, pretending to bomb places all over England. On one of them another rookie crew got careless and flew their Fort into a hill. Its officers had slept in the other four beds in Hamilton's hut; pretty soon four more had taken their place and nobody said a thing.

And it went on raining.

Flight Lieutenant Dimmock stuck his head round the door of Daisy's office, pipe in mouth. ‘How about a drink down at the pub? I think we could both do with one.'

‘Last time I went it was full of Yanks.'

‘You'll be safe enough with me. I'll defend your honour.'

‘To the death?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘All right, then.'

It had stopped raining and the sun had come out – a rather watery sun but it felt quite warm. Rather than bike down, they walked to the village by the short-cut path that led from the peri track through the nightingale woods. She had yet to hear one singing, but maybe this year?

Sandy Dimmock said, ‘The Yanks'll be starting proper ops soon. That'll give them something else to think about.'

‘It certainly will.'

She'd sat in on the practice-briefing sessions and she could tell that the sprog American crews, lolling about so airily, had no idea what they were in for. Crews never did. She'd seen the stunned look on the RAF faces when they came back from their first op. Nothing, it seemed, could prepare a man for the reality of facing a whole lot of other men doing their level best to kill him. For all their cockiness, she felt quite sorry for the Americans.

‘How do you think they'll cope, Sandy?'

He shrugged. ‘They can fly OK and they've got the guns and the guts, but, personally, I think it's lunatic to go in daylight. They've been having bloody big losses ever since they first got started last August, but it doesn't seem to put them off. The Germans have been making mincemeat of them. Of course, they can afford to lose chaps and planes – there's plenty more where they came from.'

He didn't like his job any more than she did. Put out to grass, was how he'd seen it. He'd done two tours of ops as a Blenheim pilot, got pretty badly wounded at the end and they'd grounded him ever since. Now he'd been made a messenger boy for the Yanks. His DFC wasn't much consolation.

As she'd predicted, the Mad Monk was full of Americans. In the RAF days, when she'd gone there with the other WAAFs, there had never been a problem. After they'd all been posted away, she'd made the mistake of going on her own. The landlord had served her her usual drink and she'd sat on a stool at the bar and chatted to him and his wife for a while, glad to be off the base. And then a whole lot of Yanks had arrived, disturbing the peace. They'd swaggered in like cowboys elbowing their way into a Western saloon bar – only lacking six-shooters at their hips. She'd soon been surrounded, pinned to the bar, unable to escape the relentless chatting-up, the repeated offers of another drink, the refusal to take no for an answer. In the end, she'd slid off the stool, ducked under their drinking arms and fled.

Sandy Dimmock said, ‘What'll you have, Daisy?'

‘Half a pint, please.'

He left her to go to the bar and, no sooner had he done so, the first Yank came over.

‘Hi, there. What can I buy you?'

He was tall, handsome, smiling, full of confidence. And it had to be admitted that their uniform looked very good: smooth dark olive material worn with beige-coloured trousers. Well cut, well fitting. The shirts and ties were a mystery, though. Sometimes they wore a dark olive shirt with a light olive tie and sometimes the other way round, and sometimes dark with dark or light with light, and they tucked the end of the tie inside their shirt, between the buttons, instead of fixing it with a pin. She said politely, ‘Nothing, thanks. Someone's getting it for me.'

‘The RAF guy? Hey, he can't keep you all to himself – that's not fair.' He held out his hand. ‘The name's Frank Daniels. You're Assistant Section Officer Woods – have I got that right? We've been noticing you around the base.'

Sandy came back and did his best but the American refused to budge and, before long, three more joined him. They were all pilots and therefore all officers: no sergeant pilots, as in the RAF. Their enlisted men, presumably, went to the Barley Sheaf or the Plough. The RAF crews had always drunk together, regardless of rank; not so the Americans, for all their much-toted equality. She listened to their twanging speech, to the alien words and phrases. Sandy had been right about the foreign land. She felt suddenly very homesick for the sound of RAF voices and for self-deprecating RAF ways – for quiet, ironic humour.

‘Seen you at the practice briefings,' one of them told her. ‘I guess you'd've noticed me there.'

‘I'm afraid not.' She never looked at individual faces for fear of encouraging them. At briefings, they were just rows of Yanks in brown leather jackets, smoking and chewing gum. This one was grinning at her persistently, unconvinced that she hadn't remembered him. She turned away and, oh God, there was another one of them over by the bar – not grinning though, just staring. She stared back coldly and, after a moment, he stopped and went on talking to the blond American Red Cross girl beside him.

‘I think you guys are just great,' the girl was saying. ‘You've got so much guts. All of you.'

She meant well. Saw it as her role to make them feel real fine fellas; a sort of Red Cross cheerleader. ‘We haven't done anything yet,' Hamilton reminded her. ‘Let's just wait and see how great we are.'

She said brightly, ‘The Luftwaffe don't know what's going to hit them.'

‘As a matter of fact, they do. They've got our number pretty well. They learned it fast when our guys first came over.'

‘But there's a whole lot more of you now. You'll soon finish them off. The war'll be over before we know it.'

She wasn't bad-looking with an OK figure and he liked the blond hair – but the naivety and the brightness was irritating him. He said, ‘Somehow I don't think it's going to be that easy. The RAF have been trying pretty hard for three years.'

‘Oh,' she made a face. ‘The RAF! They're not very much good, are they? Not compared with us.'

He swallowed some more of the Limey beer and, with it, the answer he might have given her – about the RAF hanging on by their fingernails and dying in their thousands but still fighting on. No point. She was too busy rooting for the USAAF.

The girl he'd noticed across the bar room was still there – the one in the British women's air force uniform; WAAFs they called them. He'd seen her with the RAF liaison officer around the base and sitting behind a table at the briefings, and he'd taken note. Very British, both of them. Reserved, correct, hiding their feelings. And they must have some interesting feelings towards the invasion of johnny-come-lately greenhorns who had finally arrived to win the war for them. She was small and dark-haired – just about the opposite of the kind he usually went for – but she was kind of interesting. He watched her some more. She'd been swatting Yanks away like troublesome flies, and he could tell she was fed up with having to do it. He didn't blame her; some of those guys weren't too subtle. She wasn't hiding her feelings that well now and when she'd seen him staring at her, she'd given him a black look. She'd be a tough nut to crack and there were plenty of other girls around who, he figured, would be a whole lot easier.

The Red Cross girl went on talking more crap but he didn't bother to listen. He lit a cigarette, smoked it slowly, and glanced across at the WAAF from time to time. Yeah, she was kind of interesting.

She left soon after with the RAF liaison officer shepherding her by the elbow through the slavering pack of wolves. He had a much better look when she passed quite close to him on the way out, and he gave her a hard stare. She gave him another big glare in return. No question about it, she was lovely.

It was almost dark when Daisy and the flight lieutenant left the pub, and in the woods it was darker still. They had one torch between them, but with its paper shield and failing battery it was next to useless. The half-moon was more help. They followed the pathway, the lieutenant leading the way. He stopped suddenly, a hand on her arm.

‘Listen!'

He'd heard the sound before she did – perhaps because his ears were better attuned to such things. In the distance she heard the rumbling drone of bombers – RAF bombers.

‘Heading for somewhere in the Ruhr, I'd guess,' he said, ‘Essen, or maybe Düsseldorf. I wish to God I were going with them.'

‘Why, Sandy? Weren't you terrified?'

‘Lord, yes. We all were – those chaps up there will be, too. But I still wish I was going with them. I feel so damn useless down here.'

They stood in silence, listening to the bombers. And then a nightingale began singing somewhere in the wood – a piping, flute-like song rising above the drone of the engines. The duet went on and on, the wartime rumble of the bombers and the sweet peacetime song of the nightingale.

The Americans carried out their first bombing mission from Halfpenny Green in early June. The target was Bremen. Daisy had attended the briefing and the atmosphere had been electric. No lolling about this time, no grinning across at her. All eyes had been on the map on the wall, all ears attuned to the briefing officers and the CO with his gung-ho speech at the end: the Jerries who'd been dishing it out for years, he said, were now going to see what it was like to take it. There was no mention of the RAF having already shown them anything of the kind.

They had passed by her desk on the way out of the hut and she had smiled at those who looked her way – which most of them did – just as she had done with the RAF crews when they went off on an op. You smiled at them because you knew they could be going to die. Following RAF custom, Daisy and the flight lieutenant went out onto the airfield and watched twenty-one Flying Fortresses take off and fly away to assemble in their box formation before they headed for Germany.

He'd seen her standing with the RAF officer at the side of the runway and waving hard as they roared by and it had amused him. Considering what they probably felt about the cocky Yanks, he thought it had been jolly decent of them to do that. She'd even smiled at him as he'd passed her table when he was leaving the briefing, but then she was smiling at all the guys and he knew why. She'd done it all before with the RAF, and she knew the score.

Seven hours later, the bombers returned in a straggling group. There was a crowd out on the control tower balcony, binoculars raised, watching them go around and come in to land. The ground crews, who had been playing softball out on the apron, were pedalling furiously on their bikes towards the hardstands. Fire and ambulance emergency trucks were tearing towards the runway. Some of the bombers had feathered engines, some trailed smoke, and some hadn't come back at all.

The four other beds in the hut were empty once again. After a couple of days or so, four more new guys turned up to fill them. Nobody mentioned the previous occupants who'd gone down in a ball of fire over Germany. Not a goddam word. Hamilton had seen it happen and he wished he hadn't. Ten men hurtling to earth in a burning, spinning spiral with no hope of bailing out. It had sickened him to watch.

They'd notched up four more missions since that first one over Bremen and every time some didn't make it back. Twenty Forts had been lost from the base in one week. He'd started thinking real hard about it. Twenty-five missions to a duty tour and the average life of an Eighth Air Force bomber crew was fifteen missions. The odds against finishing were impressive. His navigator, Don, who'd trained as an insurance actuary before the war, put it bluntly: ‘Mathematically, Ham, there's no way we're gonna live through this.'

He cursed the fact that he'd been assigned to bombers. In fighters, you stood much more of a chance; in a bomber you were a sitting duck with a lot of other sitting ducks, just waiting to get shot at. The only real defence was to stay in tight formation so the Luftwaffe guys couldn't get at you so easily without getting shot down themselves. God help a straggler or a wounded one – the German fighters picked those off in no time. They went for any ducks that went lame and for rookie crews who couldn't keep close up in proper formation. The Luftwaffe had learned pretty much every trick in the book by now, he reckoned; they'd had years of practice. As for the flak, there wasn't a damn thing you could do about that but pray.

The sane way out would be to request a transfer from flying status to some other kind of duty but then, he figured, somebody had to do the rotten, lousy job and it might as well be him. He didn't think he'd feel too good about chickening out. The rest of his crew apparently agreed, though nobody said it aloud. Pride was a part of it – no question. Pride got them into the airplane every time and made them stay there and keep on going – that and the pathetic belief that it was always going to happen to the other guys, never to them. Whenever he saw a kite go down, he never let himself think that the next one might be his. And, after the fifth mission, he'd decided to quit worrying about tomorrow. There was no tomorrow, or next week, or next month; only today. Today you were alive and you damn well enjoyed it. Forget tomorrow. That was the golden rule from now on.

He went down to London for a couple of days with Gene, took in a show, picked up some girls, spent a load of money and came back hung-over. The train had been packed with other servicemen, similarly making the most of still being alive and drowning their fears – British and Yanks cooped up tight together for several hours in an explosive mix. There'd been one hell of a fist fight that had ignited on the train and raged out of control on the platform when they'd finally arrived. The military police had stood by until it had burned itself out and then arrested any guy left standing. He and Gene had taken off before that happened.