Out of the Blue (5 page)

There was a sign in the cockpit that said
Do not exceed air speed of 500 mph
and before every take off Sammy kissed the tips of his fingers and pressed them on to the sign for luck. Sammy
radioed his readiness and waited, while in the field around him, the engines of other planes roared into life. Sammy checked the rendezvous times he had scribbled on the back of his hand, then
glanced at his watch. Right on cue he received the order he was expecting from his flight leader.

‘Red Two, this is Red Leader. Prepare to taxi for take off. Over.’

Sammy snaked his way up the field followed by his roommate, Mike, who was flying Red Three. At fifteen seconds past the minute, the two Mustangs took off into the pre-dawn sky. At thirty seconds
past they were followed by two more. When the whole of Red Group was airborne they pulled the Mustangs into their flight formation and set a course for Germany. They looked like a flock of
mechanical geese.

As the fighters climbed, Mike began to sing, his voice ethereal in the headset. Sammy grinned, wondering how long it would take before Red Leader told him to shut up.

‘
Keep on doing what you’re doin’,

your love is driving me to ruin,

keep on doin’ what you’re doin’,

’
cos I love what you do to me . . .
’

Mike sang on, his voice as light and happy as if they were heading out for a day at the beach. He got through the chorus and an entire verse of the Benny Goodman tune before Red Leader
intervened.

‘Put a sock in it, Red Three.’

‘Oh shucks, sir, don’t you love me any more?’ Mike whined. ‘What about you, Red Two? You love me, don’t you?’

‘Sorry to break it to you like this,’ Sammy replied, ‘but I’ve fallen in love with a girl called Kitty Danby.’

‘Son of a gun!’ Mike exclaimed.

‘Okay, quit goofin’ around! This is Red Leader establishing radio silence.’

Sammy’s gut clenched with the first sensation of fear the instant they had crossed the English Channel and entered a drift of thin cloud over the coast. Deeper into Germany and
Sammy’s fear heightened a degree or two as the minutes passed. Fear was such a familiar feeling to him now that he found it tolerable. He was checking the sky; over his left shoulder, to the
left, in front, to the right and over his right shoulder – his head moving in a continuous sweep.

They had reached the rendezvous and were flying at twenty-thousand feet when they saw the B-24s a few thousand feet below them. These were the bomber planes they had come to escort and protect
from enemy fighter-fire. They were heavy and slow and vulnerable to the German fighter planes, the Messerschmitt 109s, launched to stop the bombers reaching their destination.

Suddenly, radio silence was broken with the code to tell them that enemy aircraft had been sighted. ‘Bandits at six o’clock, bandits at six o’clock. Over.’

‘This is Red Leader, we’ve got two 109s at six o’clock, low. In you go, Red Two, take your wing-man. Good luck. Over.’

Sammy jettisoned the reserve fuel tank, then set his sights on the Messerschmitts and dived. A quick glance over his shoulder told him that Mike was with him. They had barely closed the gap when
the enemy planes parted and dived. Sammy radioed Mike.

‘Red Three, this is Red Two, I’ll take the left. Over.’

‘I’m on it. Over.’

As his plane plummeted, Sammy began shouting over the noise of the engine. He yelled out incomplete sentences; a mixture of coaxing and swearing. His brow was tightly furrowed, his knuckles
white, he reminded himself to breathe. He felt the pressure in his head and the buzz through his feet as the engine’s work increased. He pulled back and decelerated. Coming through the cloud
and sitting just below it, he scanned the sky for the enemy plane.

Another huge wave of fear coursed through him as he took in the empty sky. Where was it? He was extra cautious for a minute or two, varying his height and speed, but there was no sign of it. He
increased altitude and regained radio contact with Red Leader.

‘This is Red Two, do you read, over?’

‘Copy that, Red Two. You got Red Three with you?’

‘He went after one 109 – I took the other.’

‘Okay, Red Two. Red Three, Red Three do you copy? Come in, Red Three.’

Bert watched on as Sammy and a couple of the others waited beside the hut that the ground crew used as a tool store. Their faces were as grey as the sky and streaked with
grime. Time passed and reason told them that Mike wasn’t coming back. One of the bomber crews said that they had seen a Messerschmitt 109 pursuing Mike into cloud after he had broken away
from the escort party. No one had seen him after that. It was possible that he had made an emergency landing somewhere else. They didn’t discuss it; they just waited.

Bert had a primus stove in the hut and he passed black sweet tea to the waiting pilots. They knew that it was a pointless wait, but they were reluctant to leave. Eventually, they finished their
tea, lit their cigarettes and wandered back to the mess for the debriefing. No one said a word. Later it was confirmed that Mike’s plane had been hit and he hadn’t bailed out.

Sammy was hanging about putting off going to his bed, doubtful that he would be able to sleep, when he was given a message that his commanding officer wanted to see him. Sammy
knocked and entered the small office. Apparently, Mike had left a note in his locker saying that he wanted Sammy to have his books. Sammy took the books, all of them poetry collections, and went to
the room he had shared with Mike. Someone had already been in and cleared away Mike’s things.

Sammy placed the books back on the shelf where Mike had kept them. Then he took one volume up again and sat on his bed with the book in his lap. He didn’t much care for poetry. He flicked
through it for a while until he suddenly felt the wakefulness draining out of him. A heavy fatigue and the desire to sleep crept through his body like black ink seeping across blotting paper. Sammy
let the book slide to the floor and lay down.

He woke from a bad dream around two in the afternoon. He was cold and his left arm was beneath his chest and numb. He heaved himself up and sat on the edge of his bed, nursing his lifeless hand.
His blanket had fallen to the floor and, as he picked it up, he saw the book. He reached for it and turned it over in his hands. He read the spine, Robert Graves – what a name, no wonder he
had had a nightmare.

Sammy stood and went to the window. The sky was grey and it was raining again. He dressed and, taking Mike’s book, went out for some air. He crossed the airfield and stood for a while just
inside the hangar, straining his eyes to read in the gloom. He thumbed through the pages scanning the first lines until he found a short poem that he read in its entirety. It was called ‘Love
Without Hope’.

And suddenly he found himself thinking about Cory Weston. He saw her, clear as day, walking to school hugging her books to her chest – tall and straight and graceful, the
morning sun catching her red hair. And he realised that he hadn’t thought about Cory in a long time. And, remembering all of a sudden that he had once harboured the fantasy of going home a
hero and marrying her, he shuddered. The idea of marrying Cory Weston seemed ridiculous to him.

Sammy had loved Cory all his life. He was the same age as Cory’s little sister, Flick, and she adored Cory too. Together they followed her around like twin shadows. But Cory Weston barely
knew that Sammy Ray Bailey existed.

Sammy found his wallet and took out the picture of Cory that he kept there. He stood for several minutes, sheltering from the English drizzle, studying Cory’s face, trying to remember what
it was that he had felt for this girl. And that’s where Bert found him. Sammy was so engrossed that he jumped when Bert spoke to him.

‘Is that your girl?’

Bert nodded at the photograph Sammy held against the open page of his book.

Sammy blushed to the roots of his hair and Bert laughed.

‘She’s a lovely-looking girl. I hope she waits for you, son.’

Sammy experienced an uncomfortable sensation, a mixture of embarrassment and shame as he imagined what Cory would do if she’d heard herself referred to as his girl. He had been carrying
her photograph with him ever since he stole it from the Weston home five years before. It occurred to him now that, if anything happened to him, maybe someone would find the photo and give it to
his parents and then everyone would know that he had been sweet on Cory. The thought appalled him.

He read the poem again and this time he saw the boy sweeping off his ludicrous hat and the birds escaping in a great noisy humiliating spectacle. All at once Sammy realised what a fool he had
been. And he realised too that he was a completely different person from the boy who had had a secret love for Cory Weston.

He thought then of Kitty Danby and understood with a certainty that he had never felt before that she was the one; she was his future. Kitty, not Cory, was his reason for getting home alive.

He hesitated about what to do with the photograph and for a moment his hand curled round it as he considered screwing it up and throwing it away. But he could not do that. He reasoned that it
wasn’t Cory’s fault that he didn’t love her any more. Instead, he decided that one day he would slip the photograph back in the dresser drawer in the Westons’ kitchen. He
didn’t want to carry it on him any more so he put away his wallet and tucked the picture into the snug place where the page meets the spine and snapped the book closed.

Sammy ran after Bert and caught his arm. He had looked troubled when Bert had first seen him, and Bert knew he had plenty on his mind, but now he was laughing. Bert asked him what was so funny
and Sammy told him that he was mistaken about the girl in the photograph. She had been a childish crush, he said, there had never been anything between them.

Then he went on to tell Bert about finding Kitty in the road and once he started talking he couldn’t stop. He called her his little bicycle thief. He told Bert about her tears. He said he
had heard the expression about being in floods and that he now knew it to be true. This girl nearly had them both standing in puddles. He described her prettiness, her gentleness, her beautiful
voice. He had noticed her voice even while she was crying – it was not just the lilt of an accent strange to him, but a soft sweetness to her voice that drew him to her.

‘That’s the thing about her,’ he told Bert, ‘she’s sweet and funny and pretty, but it just feels so right when I’m with her. She’s the one for me,
without a doubt, she’s the one!’

Bert reaches for his tea while Kitty sits and stares ahead. She has stopped writing.

‘He fell for you, Kitty, that lad did – you were such a pretty little thing and he was over the moon about you.’

Kitty comes back to the present and smiles but shakes her head. ‘No, you’re wrong, Bert – he had a sweetheart back home.’

Bert waves his big bent hand dismissively.

‘No, he told me that he was over —’

‘I was very young and he wasn’t much older . . . and the war, you know how things were, Bert. People said a lot of things . . .’

Bert frowns, his lips move as if he is working himself up to speak, but he says no more.

‘You’re tired, Bert,’ Kitty says as she notes his pallor and the loss of light in his eyes. ‘We both are. I should be getting on now if I’m not going to get caught
in the traffic.’

What Bert has told her about Sammy troubles her, but Kitty dampens her feelings by focusing her attention elsewhere. Bert seemed altered to her and she worries that remembering the war has been
too much for him. She walks back up the road to her car and wonders whether she should tell June her concerns. She reaches the house and the sound of a vacuum cleaner from an upstairs bedroom
window puts her off ringing the bell. June is busy and Bert, no doubt, will be fine after a rest. She drops the key through the letterbox.

Kitty drives home carefully. She tries not to think about what Bert has told her. The roads soon become busy.
There are bigger roads now,
thinks Kitty. There are dual carriageways and
motorways and yet they still clog up. She remembers the lanes she walked as a young girl.
You hardly ever saw a car
, she thinks. Then she remembers a time when Kent’s lanes were full
of traffic; a winding snake of vehicles that stretched for mile after mile.

Kitty sat up in the darkness, her heart pounding.

‘Who’s there?’ she said, her voice coming in a hoarse whisper.

‘Look, Kit! Just come and look at this will you!’

Charlie was standing at the window beside her bed and the next moment he had it open and was leaning out. A loud drone filled the room: a magnified version of the sound that Kitty now realised
had penetrated her sleep. She climbed out of bed and reached for her dressing gown.

‘What time is it?’

‘It’s the invasion, Kitty!’ Charlie grinned at her as she squeezed beside him at the window. ‘We’re going to kick the Nazis out of France.’

The sky was beginning to lighten and in the shadows beneath the window, a convoy of monochrome vehicles rolled by.

‘It’s been going on for hours,’ Charlie said. ‘I was half asleep and I thought someone was out in a tractor. Then I realised that it had been going on too
long.’

They heard shouts in the distance. Then a shouted order that came relaying towards them and in a moment or two the convoy came to a halt. In the semi-darkness, men began jumping from the backs
of trucks, then spilling over the sides and suddenly there were men everywhere. Charlie whooped and ran across Kitty’s bed in his haste to leave the room. Kitty got dressed and went down to
the kitchen where she found Aunt Vi bustling around and pleased to see her.