Lost in the Flames

This book is dedicated to

 

Flying Officer John Ross
186 Squadron, RAF Bomber Command

And 55,572 others who shared his fate

International Bomber Command Centre

The International Bomber Command Centre is being built to ensure that the personal memories of those involved in or affected by Bomber Command are recorded as a means of educating current and future generations about the Command’s fascinating and, at times, difficult history. Contributions from across the world are being collected to add to the archive and inform the exhibition. To find out more please visit:
www.internationalbcc.co.uk

RAF Bomber Command fought for our freedom from the opening day of the Second World War until the eve of VE Day, the only one of the Services to take the fight to the enemy from the very beginning to the very end. Night after night they went, cramped and frozen in their flying coffins, to strike at Germany's cities and industries. Each time they flew among the searchlights, the night-fighters and the flak, they did so in the knowledge that many of their number would be dead before dawn.

125,000 men served as Bomber Command aircrew. Their average age was 22. Many were in their late teens. They were all volunteers, most of them civilians before the war intervened. Of every 100 who flew, around half could expect to be killed in the air. On some nights, more men were lost than in the whole of the Battle of Britain. They died in many different ways – from flak wounds and cannon shells, trapped and burning in a spinning plane, hurtling with no parachute from the sky, crushed as their aircraft smashed into the ground, shot or hanged if they reached the ground alive, coming to grief in the fog when landing back at base. At the height of the campaign only one man in six could expect to survive a first tour of thirty operations. One in forty might survive a second. The loss rate was higher than any other Service and the life expectancy of six weeks was on a par with that of infantry officers on the Somme. When it was all over, more than 12,000 Bomber Command aircraft had been destroyed and 55,573 aircrew were dead.

Yet for years the sacrifice and bravery of these young men went largely unrecognised. 2012 finally saw the opening of an official memorial to Bomber Command, but it was nearly 70 years in coming – a long time for the dead to be spinning in their graves – and most of the aircrew who survived the war are no longer alive to see it. Churchill backed the bombing strategy but abruptly disowned it at war's end for reasons of political expediency, snubbing the bomber crews in his 1945 victory speech. The other branches of the Services received their campaign medals but none has ever been awarded to Bomber Command. In the decades after the war, there were increasing attempts, with the benefit of hindsight and the comfortable knowledge of victory, to draw a veil over their contribution, to paint the crews at best as brave but immoral and at worst as war criminals, even drawing comparisons – in A. C. Grayling's
Among the Dead Cities
– with the 9/11 bombers. Whatever the controversies that have swirled around the strategy of the bombing campaign, surely they deserve a better epitaph than that, all those boys who were lost in the flames?

To honour their courage and sacrifice and to regret the death and destruction that the war brought with it need not be mutually exclusive undertakings.

The route out took them over the Dutch coast and then suddenly they were on the run-in to the target, the master bomber overhead, guiding them in, Jacob in the nose, fussing over the bomb-sight and the selector switches, the target looming beneath him, edging itself inside him now, eating him away, the way it always did. Then Charlie breathing out adjustments to the course, his voice down the intercom like a ghost, Ralph responding in word and action, adjusting B-Beauty’s path, setting his fear aside until the bombing run was over, Roland hurling out bundles of foil strips to scramble the German radar, searchlights lamping up the sky, light flak tracing slow-motion streams of red and green, accelerating as it passed. Then a plane struck away off to starboard, a little lick of flame along the fuselage becoming a stream then a deluge, the flares inside the belly of the pathfinder igniting, dripping bright gobs of light, the plane dipping away, bleeding red and green fluorescence from its guts, spinning down like a Catherine wheel, and Jacob in the front of Beauty, concentrating now, the target coming near, then the aiming point in his sights and he is suddenly cold, and his flares are going down, Christmas trees of cascading light, and the bombs drop away and the plane lifts then settles, freed at last of its bombs. Ralph banks them away as a torrent of flares from other pathfinders goes down, then the intense white light of fighter flares bursting apart the night with their glare, and Beauty is fleeing headlong now, racing towards the darkness, Ralph’s hands shaking violently upon the control wheel, flak bursting beneath, then Jacob coming up from the nose and taking the controls as Ralph goes back to the rest-bed, looking back as he goes, guilty and wrong but forgiven all the same, and Jacob is guiding Beauty now, loving her, taking her away from the target, that thing he never wants to see, slipping away beneath him now, another bad glow in the memory and he is leaving it behind.

But then a judder, a ripping sound, like gravel, gravel on a corrugated metal roof, explosive shells raking along the underside, the rear gunner shot to pieces, a leg ripped off at the knee, wind raging around his shattered guns, and Jim silent too in the other turret, slumped in his harness, all but dead, his heart spraying his life away, wasting it all over the ribs of the fuselage, blood hissing on the searing metal of the burning plane as a torrent of flame is sucked down its steel tunnel to where the other gunner sits already burnt black. And then another shrieking pass by the Ju-88, incendiary shells ripping through the mid-section, the wireless set bursting into flames, George bursting apart at the seams as the cannon shells tear through the fuselage, in and out of him, up again into the night through the shattered metal above his head, his blood soaking Charlie’s desk, turning the maps and charts blood-black in the light of the flames, the angle-poise lamp throwing its bulb now towards the roof, Charlie on the floor with his oxygen tube around his neck, struggling to throw it off, and Ralph rising from the rest-bed and crawling through slime towards the cockpit where Jacob and Roland struggle to hold Beauty level as she tosses her head and throws her reins and demands to be allowed to let herself fall, tired of the whip, tired of fighting through the fire and the night just to go out again the next day, trailing her mane of fire behind her, shuddering now, shaking again as more shells rip into her guts and another fighter homes in on the blaze and pumps more death inside her, strips of Window cascading up through the cabin in the rush of air that pours in through her wounds as she fills up with smoke.

‘We’ve had it, lads!’ shouts Jacob over the intercom. ‘Bale out! Bale out! And get out quick!’

Ralph is in the cockpit now, looking up at Jacob from his place on the floor, then standing and staring at him as the foil strips swirl around and glycol from the tank in the nose sprays about and Jacob shouts at him repeatedly.

‘Get out!’ he shouts. ‘Fucking get out!’

Ralph tries to grab the control wheel, tries to haul it back, but Jacob hands him off and Roland pushes him hard towards the hatch at the front and Ralph goes down the step into the nose, kicks the hatch away, sits on the edge, looks back, drops out into the freezing night. Jacob shoves Roland away too and Roland jumps and Jacob is alone now with the dead men. He stares behind him at the blazing interior of
the fuselage. He hauls at the wheel, pulls Beauty level, then stands up and steps back towards the navigator’s desk and slips on something soft that glistens and seems to be moving still, and he bends down and holds his face close up next to Charlie and hears him whimper, or perhaps it is just the gurgle of the blood that bubbles up in his throat, specking Jacob’s face red with spittle as Charlie coughs and tries to say something, then coughs up again and speckles him more. Beauty is pitching forward again now and Jacob lurches back to the wheel and pulls her level and holds her steady then lets her go and returns to Charlie but he will not cough for him now, does not whimper or gurgle, and the blood does not bubble up in his throat but lies flat inside his mouth, flat black ink inside a well from which no more words can come. Jacob looks now to where George is a dark bundle by the main spar and he steps towards him, slipping in a hot slick of blood and slither that is beginning to simmer and burn, and he takes George’s gloved wrist and tugs, pulls him towards him, feels him light beneath his grip, realises he is pulling only half a man, the hips separated from the waist by a cannon shell or a ripping piece of fuselage, and Jacob lets go and slips, then stands and moves again towards the main spar to get at the gunners, but he cannot get across it, Beauty’s metal burns him, burns him through his flying suit, and the flames really get a grip on him now, force him back, and Beauty is tipping again, tipping away down, and he slithers across to the wheel and hauls it back and Beauty shakes, a great wracking judder as an engine disintegrates and hot shrapnel comes zinging in, and she lurches to one side and bows her head and Jacob is aflame and he takes a last look at the dark shapes that were Charlie and George and he stumbles down the step to the bomb-aimer’s dome and he sits beside the hatch, burning he is, burning beside the selector switches and the bomb-sight through which he has seen his war, nights of criss-cross streets of orange, the city’s lattice-work kissed by the silent crump of bombs thousands of feet below, and he pushes his flaming feet through the open hatch and the wind wrenches his burning boots away and he thinks again of Rose, his Rose, the reason he had to get through this war …

It was nearly Christmas. Jacob Arbuckle was standing on the corner of New Street with his older sister Vera and her best friend Rose, snow sheeting down from a cold December sky, falling for him, he thought, layering him in white. His eyes fell on Norman Miller and he sensed Vera’s gaze alight upon him too, observing in that quiet thoughtful way of hers the man who sat stiff and serious on the seat of the trap as the pony tripped up the hill towards Chipping Norton market square, edged by trees and dotted with Model-T Fords and traders’ vans.

Norman brought his horse to a halt with a tug of the rein and a click of the tongue, stepped down into the market square, and disappeared out of sight behind the Town Hall as his dogs sidled after him.

‘Come on, Jacob,’ said Vera, her voice cool but her eyes aflame. ‘I’ve got an errand to run.’

She stepped out into the whitening street as Rose grabbed Jacob’s hand and dragged him along.

‘What sort of errand?’ Jacob called out, griping at the sudden change of plan. They had been on their way to Pool Meadow to skim stones across the pond, an important pursuit for an eleven-year-old boy.

‘Mind your own business, Jacob,’ said Vera over her shoulder to where Jacob walked hand in hand now with Rose. ‘Important errands aren’t for little boys like you.’

‘I’ll remember that next time you ask me to do something!’

‘Shush, you cheeky little bugger,’ laughed Rose. ‘Don’t talk to your big sister like that.’

Rose grinned at him but he snatched his hand away and stomped after Vera as Rose swayed along behind in a manner she believed to be indicative of elevated aesthetic preferences.

Jacob caught up with Vera and prodded her.

‘I said what sort of errand?’

‘Jacob, will you ever stop asking questions?’

‘I said what sort of errand?’

‘Well if you must know, I need some wool. I have to make some gloves.’

‘You’ve already got some.’

‘Shut up, Jacob. Please.’

Jacob saw Norman Miller with an older man on the Town Hall steps, stooping over together as if looking at something small that he was holding in his hands. Vera was looking too, at his hands, big bare reddening things going ruddy in the snow, red with work and cold. Norman glanced up and caught Vera’s eye and she spun away and hauled Jacob into the haberdashery. Rose hovered outside momentarily, then swooned in through the door.

‘I shall be requiring some wool,’ Vera declared to the woman behind the counter.

‘Well you’ve come to the right place, then, haven’t you?’

Rose leant down and Jacob felt her breath upon him as she whispered in his ear, just a touch louder than he knew she should, ‘Oh Jacob, don’t you just hate irony in the uneducated?’

He smiled up at Rose, then smirked at the woman. The woman looked him up and down and readdressed herself to Vera.

‘What colour will you be wanting?’

She stumbled over her words slightly now and Rose smiled and Jacob smirked again. Vera peered past the stuttering woman and the rolls of cloth stacked in the bay window and out through the falling snow towards Norman Miller. Jacob followed her gaze onto the stranger outside and felt something inside himself click into place.

‘Brown,’ said Vera. ‘And of the very highest quality. It must be brown like the colour of that man’s suit – you see him, over there. Him.’

The woman behind the counter looked at Vera, then at Jacob. Jacob shrugged beneath her gaze.

‘It’s not my bloody fault,’ he said.

‘Mind your language, Jacob,’ said Vera coolly.

‘Yes, Jacob, mind your bloody language,’ said Rose.

The woman glared at Jacob again, then pulled out a box and
dropped it on the counter. Up rose a cloud of dust, a small explosion.

‘That’s Norman Miller, that is,’ said the woman, regaining her composure in her natural habitat of gossip. ‘Arrived just last month, from up north somewhere. Got a right queer accent, he has. Not unpleasant, mind.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Hard life, by all accounts.’

‘A hard life?’ asked Vera, fingering a ball of wool, feigning indifference.

‘Yes, poor Norman Miller,’ the woman went on. ‘Lost his father early on. If he was his father. Not confirmed, apparently, his parentage. Slight ambiguity there. Brought up by his grandmother, so they say.’

‘So who says?’ said Jacob.

The woman ignored his interruption.

‘So who says?’ he said again.

‘You’re a bright little spark, aren’t you?’ said the woman sharply.

‘Oh yes, he’s bright, all right,’ said Rose. ‘Started at the Grammar School in September. They say he has an inquiring mind.’

‘Do they really?’ The woman studied Jacob down the length of her fulsome nose. ‘Well he should save that for when he’s a policeman.’

‘He’s not going to be a policeman,’ said Rose.

‘No, of course not,’ said the woman. ‘He’ll be on the land all his life. Or the tweed mill if he’s lucky. Just like every other poor sod round here.’

‘No, he won’t,’ Rose spat. ‘What are you going to be, Jacob? Go on, tell her.’

‘A pilot,’ he whispered.

‘A pilot? Ha! Setting our sights a bit high, are we?’

‘It’s true. I’m going to be a pilot,’ he blurted out now. ‘Father always tells us to aim for the sky, so that’s what I’ll do. I’m going to fly around the world and back again!’

‘That’s right,’ said Rose. ‘So leave the little lad alone. Just because you have no hope doesn’t mean he should have none too.’

Jacob felt the woman’s discomfort, shifting about behind the counter now, her unease washing over him like a balm. He knew they had broken her – him and Rose – they had won again like he knew they would.

Vera was rooting around in the box. She took out several balls of wool of slightly different earthy hues.

‘That one,’ said Rose. ‘The others are far too agricultural.’

‘Yes, I like that one too,’ said Jacob. ‘It’s the colour of sparrows.’

The woman would not contradict him now. Rose had quietened her. She had done it for him.

‘Right,’ said Vera. ‘I’ll have that one. Sparrows it is.’

She left her coins on the counter and nudged Jacob towards the door. He glanced back at the woman. She was looking at the floor.

Norman Miller was still by the Town Hall, talking to the man, his dogs at his heel. He wore a rough tweed suit with a waistcoat and tie and a pair of solid boots. His physical dimensions were of a magnitude that would disincline the beasts of the field to resist if he whacked them with a clubbing paw of a hand and growled at them to get a move on as his pair of border collies harried them about the ankles. He caught Vera’s eye momentarily again as she passed and Jacob sensed Norman’s immensity as he hurried by beneath him, this great hulking man, hulking over him but somehow good, reassuring, like a solid piece of timber, a thing you could make something from, a life perhaps. Jacob grinned at Norman and the hulking thing offered an inclination of the head in return.

Jacob and Vera left Rose at the door of the Co-operative store, where she went in search of camphor to exterminate the moths that had been up to no good in her wardrobe and gin for her grandmother’s evening pick-me-up.

‘Jacob, why were you so horrid to that woman?’ said Vera, as they trailed back along West Street. ‘You and Rose are always the same. I don’t know what gets into you.’

‘She deserved it,’ said Jacob. ‘Rose told me she was rude to her once. And she was rude to me too, didn’t believe it, that I’ll be a pilot one day.’

‘Well maybe she’s right. Maybe you won’t.’

‘Of course I will.’

Norman Miller clipped by again on his pony and trap.

‘Hey, mister!’ called Jacob. ‘My sister thinks you’re …’

But Vera cut him short with a swift clip to the head as Norman glanced back and disappeared around the bend. Vera gave Jacob a kick up the backside and chased him down the dirt path that led to the terraced stone cottage next to the orchard where fat porkers belched the day away beneath black-branched apple trees. Alfred Arbuckle was in the back alley that ran along behind the cottages, dragging a knife
along a stone step in the snow, keening its edge.

‘Hello father,’ said Vera as she skipped down the steps past the grating blade.

‘Hello father,’ echoed Jacob.

‘Pork for Sunday dinner,’ said Alfred, gesturing his children towards the out-house door opposite the kitchen.

They poked their noses inside and sniffed. A carcass hung from a beam, split from chin to groin, dripping blood from its nose onto the floor.

‘You’ve killed Chamberlain?’ whispered Jacob, aghast. ‘He was my favourite.’

Alfred Arbuckle was in the habit of naming his pigs after British Prime Ministers before electing which of them would be next for the chop.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘One man, one pig, one vote. And anyway, that’s Gladstone. Chamberlain’s not nearly fat enough yet. We’ll have some of the leg tomorrow and then I’ll do some sausages and we’ll sell the rest. Vera, there’s some potatoes in the kitchen that need peeling.’

He thrust out the knife and she took it and went inside. Jacob was in the out-house now, peering into the cage where he kept Eric and Penelope. He cooed at them and they cooed back, Eric fluffing up his feathers in that way he always did.

‘Hello, Eric,’ said Jacob. ‘Hello, Penelope. Good day to you both, my dears.’

Jacob loved his pigeons. He thought they probably loved him too, in whatever way pigeons do.

‘Jacob!’ came his father’s voice again. ‘Go help William dig some more spuds out of the vegetable patch. They’ve been in the ground far too long already, should have been out weeks ago.’

He handed Jacob a garden fork.

‘And make sure you get the big ones, nothing smaller than your fist,’ he said, holding his fist up to the boy’s face, and the boy held up his own little fist in return.

‘See you later, you two,’ said Jacob as he drew his face away from the cage.

He went round to the front of the house where the potatoes grew in a patch at the end of the garden, overlooking the valley and the road that led up the hill towards Stow and then on towards Cheltenham and
Worcester and down which he watched the sheep travel to the market on Wednesdays and the cattle on Saturdays.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been, Jacob?’ a voice called out as Jacob approached down the path to the vegetable patch. William was thirteen, a couple of years older than his brother, and considered this differential in age sufficient justification for superiority of familial rank, despite his silent recognition that Jacob was better endowed in what their mother Elizabeth always referred to as ‘the intellectual department’. William knew that at their age brawn would usually overcome brain. Jacob knew it too, but pretended he didn’t.

He ignored William’s question.

‘I said where the bloody hell have you been?’ William repeated, a notch louder and half an octave higher.

‘Sod off,’ said Jacob. ‘I’ve got to dig some spuds.’

‘I said where have you been?’ said William, grabbing Jacob by the ear and wrenching it, watching his knuckles go white as the ear went red.

‘In town, buying wool,’ said Jacob. ‘You sod.’

William let him go.

‘What kind of wool?’

‘What do you mean what kind of wool? From a bloody sheep, of course.’

‘I meant what colour.’

‘Well why didn’t you say that, then?’

‘Do you want me to break your bloody nose again?’

‘Fuck off, William.’

William grabbed a potato, the biggest he could see, and chucked it at Jacob. It caught him on the nose. Jacob chucked it back. When Alfred came round to find out what was causing the commotion, potatoes were strewn around the vegetable patch and Jacob’s nose was running with blood.

‘Come on William, help me cut up Gladstone. Go round to the out-house. I’ll be there shortly.’

Alfred took his handkerchief from his pocket, specked with Gladstone’s blood, and passed it to Jacob.

‘Wipe your nose, Jacob, there’s a good lad. No harm done.’

He patted him on the head and left him to his digging. Jacob heaved up more worms than potatoes, dabbing away the blood as he
dug, and he lobbed the wriggling creatures to the robin that hopped around his feet. When he had filled the bucket with spuds, he trailed back round to the kitchen and tipped them into the sink for Vera to wash and peel. Then he went out into the out-house. His heart sank and his blood rose. The cage door was open.

‘William!’ he screamed, tearing outside again to where his brother sat on the stone steps, humming.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Jacob yelled.

William smiled back.

‘You bloody sod! Where are they?’

William glanced upwards and Jacob followed his gaze into the branches of the elm that hung above their heads. Eric and Penelope sat side by side on one of the upper limbs. Eric cooed and Jacob cooed back. Eric puffed up his feathers.

‘They’re never going to come back now, are they?’ said William. ‘Up into the blue forever. It’s bloody cruel anyway, keeping the poor buggers in a cage all the time.’

‘No, it’s not. They like it here. I’m like their dad, I am.’

‘Course you are. Birdbrain.’

‘You’re the bloody numbskull, William …’

But William was gone, leaving Jacob with his nose still running with blood, calling his birds’ names up into the tree.

In the house, Vera was hacking at the potatoes with her knife. Her mother Elizabeth was struggling to light the fire. Once the kindling had taken light and started to crack and spark, she placed the fireguard carefully around the grate and went out to see why her sons had been yelling at each other again. Alfred heard the popping sparks and rushed in and touched the fireguard again and again, adjusting its position in the way he had always done since ‘the incident’. This unnamed conflagration, too awful even at a distance of several years to be referred to directly among the family, would forever cast its long shadow across Alfred’s demeanour and distort the lens through which he had previously seen the world. The family had been living at the time in a larger cottage on the main street in Over Norton, next to a pair of old chestnut trees from which the blackbirds sang away their hearts each morning. Alfred’s three older boys, James, John and Ernest, had always slept in the top room in a double bed among the spinning wheels and the wool-pile that Elizabeth turned into rough garments
and blankets for the mill. The night of the incident had been freezing cold, thick snow muffling the world outside, a roaring fire warming the front room. The family had sat in the grudging light of oil lamps and orange flames until the dying fire and the creeping cold forced them to their beds. A spark leapt from the near-dead coals downstairs. The conflagration woke Alfred first, smoke and flames climbing the stairs as the edge of the steps glowed orange. Alfred roared the family into wakefulness. Vera snatched Jacob and ran with him under her arm down the stairs through the flames, smacking his head on the banister, breaking his nose and knocking him nearly senseless. Elizabeth hurried down with William while Alfred went panic-stricken and bellowing to the top room where the rising poisonous smoke hung thickest and James, John and Ernest lay utterly still in the big bed beneath the wool-pile. Alfred carried them out and laid them on the ground as the snow slid off the hot roof in sheets and Jacob looked on, his nose streaming with blood, and William buried his head in his mother’s folds. The coroner arrived the next morning and within the week James, John and Ernest were gone for good, at rest in the grounds of St Mary’s Church a mile down the road in Chipping Norton. Alfred found the family a cottage down the hill off West Street where he now hung his porcine prime ministers from the out-house beam and his two remaining sons flung potatoes at each other in the patch of mud in the garden and his daughter Vera considered just how large she should make her sparrow-brown gloves for Norman Miller.