Somewhere Over England (39 page)

But land was in sight and Barney did a count of dead and injured and Ed listened on the intercom. Maybe Eriksson was dead, there was no answer. Marco, Frank injured.

The
Emma Lou
was lower now and he didn’t know if he could get her back. Some of them must be saved at least.

‘You guys that can, bale out.’ He nodded at Barney. ‘You too. Get out. Now.’

He didn’t look as Barney left, but fought to keep the ship up because he still had Marco and Frank. Maybe he could do it but the fighters were still with them and they were indicating that he had no undercarriage and he waved as they flew past, not showing what he felt. He was cool and calm because he had to be. For Christ’s sake, he had to be. Number three engine was struggling but the prop was still turning. The ship was
yawing and he corrected her, just. Swearing, he kept her on course, checking the compass, seeing the fields too close, too goddamn low. He eased her up, feeling the drag pulling the wing round, but he fought back, careful not to stall. The airfield was ahead now.

The bombers were all down, all on their hard standing but the crews would not be debriefing, they would be there, waiting, watching, but he didn’t think he was going to make it and he hoped to God there was no fuel left because he didn’t want to burn.

The Mustangs were above him now.

‘You OK, Marco, Frank?’

‘Just fine and dandy, boss,’ Marco said but his voice was very faint.

‘We’ve no undercarriage. Just hang on, and I’ll bring you in safe.’ But would he? He was so tired and his arms were shaking. His mouth was dry, so dry.

The ship was yawing again and he had to bring her straight. She was low and slow, the engine still spluttering, and now he could see the ambulances hurtling from behind the tower, out to the end of the runway but he couldn’t hear the siren because of the wind in the plane, the cracking of the fuselage, the spluttering of number three engine. She was lurching in over the tree tops, and he reached to put down the landing gear, but then stopped, because there was none there.

He brought her down on the runway then and he felt the drag on that goddamn wing, saw it tip then right itself, and then tip again, catching, tearing. He heard such noise, such noise as he had never thought existed, and then the plane flipped over and he saw the ground come up to crush the cockpit and for a moment he felt the pain, but only for a moment.

Helen was home, standing by the sink unable to work because she was so cold, suddenly so cold. She put the potatoes back into the water, then turned and stood quite still. She stood like that, just looking at the Advent candles, the tree which stood surrounded by presents, watching as Laura and Chris laid the table and looked at her, their eyes masked, uncertain. Then the jeep came.

They all heard the knocking at the door but Helen insisted
on answering because she knew who it would be and in a quiet voice the Colonel told her that the
Emma Lou
had crash-landed, that Marco and Frank were injured but that Ed had been hurt too, so badly hurt that the medics did not know how long he would survive.

Helen reached for her coat and looked at Laura, telling her to stay with Chris, and then she left, out into the starlit night. She felt the air harsh in her lungs and breathed it in and out, in and out, but then it changed into the thick leather warmth of the car. She sat back and breathed and counted and looked up at the stars and the moon and knew that she and Ed should not have thought of the future.

She didn’t cry, she couldn’t cry because he wasn’t going to die. He was her husband and he couldn’t die. But he might if she cried.

She sat, holding one hand with the other, squeezing, hurting, but not allowing the tears to come, or the hoarse voice to be heard. It must stay inside to tear jagged into her mind but it must not escape because the raven of the gods might hear, and lead them to him. No she must not cry or call because then he might be found.

They drove up to the largest Nissen hut at the field hospital at Little Odbury air base. The roadways were filled with jeeps, command cars, ambulances, MPs and a plane flew in low overhead to land. Men were rushing but not running and Helen wondered if she was going mad.

The Colonel pushed his way through the men and soldiers who stood in lines or wandered about, looking shocked, tired. He spoke to a corpsman who pointed to the far door, giving directions. They hurried from one hut to another but could not find him. In and out, from darkness to light, from cold to warmth and he could be dead while they walked like this.

‘He could be dead,’ she shouted at another corpsman who had shaken his head when McDonald was mentioned, pointing to yet another hut.

The Colonel took her arm. ‘It’s going to be OK. He’s in the next one, I’ll bet you.’ But he wasn’t and neither could they find Marco or Frank.

They pushed back to the clerk behind the main desk who told them that all three had been transferred to the Winton Hospital near Norwich.

They drove for what seemed like hours, picking out the white line along the side of the road when it existed and now the darkness inside her head was lifting and just despair remained. They passed through a village and saw the lighted church, the stained glass windows illuminated for the first time since war began but it meant nothing to her, not now.

It was two a.m. before they arrived and then they followed the nurse down a long ward, hearing her shoes squeaking on the waxed floor and the groans and breathing of the shapes behind the white screens which surrounded each bed. A nurse came out from one and a doctor from another and others were busy too. Ed was in the end bed, near the double doors and the sister’s desk so that he was never beyond her hearing.

Helen stopped and looked as the nurse eased back the screens and she was counting again, breathing in and out; one, two, three, four. His head and body were bandaged but his hands were the same, lying still, so still on the sheets. She sat on the chair, holding his fingers.

‘Falling from more trees, my darling,’ she said and though her voice was steady tears were coursing down her face. His fingers squeezed hers but his eyes did not open.

She stayed all night and the next day and the next, refusing to be moved until the X-rays showed no broken spine but two cracked vertebrae and a broken leg. And head injuries.

She didn’t know for another week whether he was going to be brain damaged, blind or crippled and so she could only sit by his bed, holding his hand, talking of Greater Mannenham, of the snow which was deep and cold, of the hoar frosts, and all the time she did not know if he heard her. She didn’t think of the gods they had challenged, or the man in the wheelchair by the Cambridge river. She thought of Ed tossing hay, playing baseball, and gripped the sheet but not his hands. These she stroked calmly and never cried when she sat with him.

The doctor came to her as she left the room at the end of the first week in January, taking her into the office, sitting down behind the desk, steepling his hands as he smiled and told her that there would be no lasting physical damage but perhaps there would be trauma, though war had a habit of producing that anyway.

Helen went to the room she had taken in the local inn, climbed the stairs and sat by the window, not drawing the
curtains across because she wanted to see the snow, so clean and white like his bandages were. She wanted to feel the cold air and opened the window. Her breath puffed out in the crisp night. He was not going to die. She wanted to shout it out for the world to hear because this time the man she loved was not going to die.

On 9 January the Battle of the Bulge was over and the Germans were being squeezed out of their Ardennes salient and Helen had to sit by his bed, holding his hand tightly, and tell him that Marco had died of his injuries.

He cried and she stayed until he slept but then had to return home because she had to be up as usual at five-thirty to begin work at the farm.

Ed lay in the dark when she had gone, still unable to feel his feet or move them, but it was of Marco he thought, killed on his twenty-fifth mission and that night he had a dream of blood on his face, dried blood which would not scrape off even though he rubbed it against his shoulder. The nurse came and soothed him, asking who Joe was. He had almost forgotten but he dreamt the same dream the next night and this time the blood was all over him and it wasn’t Joe’s blood, it was all those people who had been beneath his bombs and the nurse came again, but he only wanted Helen and she came when the hospital called her.

In February he was transferred to a recuperation hospital in Scotland and was able to write to his father that at last he had seen the country where their ancestors came from and it was very like the valley in Montana where they lived.

From 13 to 15 February Dresden was bombed by the Allies when it was full of refugees. Hundreds of thousands died and Ed lay listening to the news of the raid, glad that he was lying here with pain coursing through his body because at least that particular guilt was not added to the load he already bore and which was heavier than anything else had ever been.

Helen wrote every day to Ed before cycling to work through a winter which was harder than any she remembered. Her hands were numb before she had left the village, her breath was frozen in the scarf which she wound round her nose and mouth. In March the Allies crossed the Rhine and now, when Chris asked if the war was nearly over she said, ‘Yes, my darling.’

In the middle of March Ed was shipped back to the United States to convalesce and she travelled to Liverpool to catch a glimpse before he sailed, but the train was held up for troop movements and so she missed him and had to stand, watching the stern of the ship and its wake, feeling the cold, remembering Heine who had left from here too. She was alone again.

The trip back on the troop ship would take ten long days, Ed had been told as he hauled himself up the gangway, a corpsman following close behind, but he would not go on a stretcher. He was going to walk out of England as he had walked into it.

He looked over his shoulder all the time but she didn’t come. Helen didn’t come. He eased himself down into the bowels of the ship, feeling the heat, the stench of illness and lay on a bunk in a converted hospital ward filled with bunks. Men lay groaning, swearing or were silent and Ed looked up at the base of the bunk above him. She hadn’t come.

He felt the heave of the ship as they met open water and the pain in his back from his cracked vertebrae grew worse and his leg throbbed though it was out of plaster. A corpsman came round to each bunk checking pulse and blood pressure and it was good to feel fingers on his wrist and a voice saying, ‘You’re doing just fine, Major. Be home real soon.’

But he didn’t want to go Stateside. He wanted to be with her.

Doctors were on call all day and all night and as the pain grew worse and the throbbing of his leg drowned out the vibration of the engines and the roll of the dice as three men shot crap, they gave him morphine.

‘But not much, Major. Just enough. Don’t want you getting too fixed on this.’ The doctor smiled, holding the syringe to the lights, easing up the plunger, expelling the air.

‘I seemed to be getting better, Doc,’ Ed said, his voice tight from pain. ‘So what the hell is happening?’

The doctor swabbed his arm, inserting the needle. ‘Everything’s going just swell, Major. It’s those roads you had to use to get to the docks in Liverpool.’ He grinned, pressing in the plunger. ‘Got themselves a few pot-holes I guess, knocked
everything about a bit. It’ll settle, don’t you worry.’

‘Hey, Doc, there’s a man here bleeding from his goddamn nose.’ The voice was urgent, frightened, and the doctor moved quickly, dropping the empty syringe into the enamel kidney bowl the corpsman held. Ed heard voices, murmurs and always the groans, and then there was nothing.

When he woke the pain was better even though the ship was lurching and bucking and as the days passed he was able to ease himself from the bunk and, with a Captain who had lost a hand flying a bitch of a Fortress, he inched along the deck, feeling the lash of the wind, watching the other ships steaming with them, noting the zig-zag course.

The Captain handed him a Lucky Strike and put one in his own mouth but Ed lit the match because Captain John Bryan still held the pack and he only had one goddamn hand, hadn’t he? It was good to be with a flyer, to ease into chairs and look out on to big seas which broke and sprayed the deck; to look out and see no planes, no wind socks, no bombed houses, to hear no dawn roar of departing planes.

He sucked on his cigarette, drawing the nicotine deep into his lungs, feeling its heat. He expelled his breath, seeing it whipped away. There was no reason for them to talk much because they had both felt the same fear and pain as their Fortresses were hit. They both remembered the judder and the stagger and understood the darkness in one another’s eyes.

They ate a plateful of food in the canteen which would fill six stomachs in the villages they had flown over and John told him of the girl he had met but would not marry because his high school sweetheart was waiting in Arizona.

Ed told him of Helen, whom he had married. He cut up John’s steak, grinning when his buddy said they would make a good team.

‘I’ll be your legs, cling on to that mare back in Montana, you can hold the reins,’ John said, eating relish on its own. ‘Gee, it’s going to be good to get back.’

Ed shook salt on his meat, seeing the blood ooze from the rare steak. ‘But do you reckon they’ll understand?’

It was hours later that John replied. They were sitting in on a poker game, the two of them playing one hand; John holding the cards, Ed slapping them down.

‘I guess Ruby won’t know what the last two years have been
like. I’ve changed. I don’t know if we’ll make it. Maybe I should have brought my village girl back, she knows what it’s all about I guess,’ John said.

He said nothing more and the smoke was heavy in the room off the end of the ward. It stung Ed’s eyes and he narrowed them, checking the cards, raising the stakes until they lost and then they walked around the deck, slowly because he was still limited in his movement.