The Separation (19 page)

I began to relish the cool airy heights of the Pennines, the gusting winds with their constant threat of rain, the clouded view of the great Cheshire Plain below, the fields and towns and drystone walls, the dark sprawl of industrial Manchester lying to the north. It made me think of the post-raid briefing I had listened to half-enviously a few nights earlier, when the other crews returned from the squadron’s first full raid. They had attacked Emmerich, a German town on the border with Holland, and returned with vivid descriptions of flying over the buildings, watching the bombs exploding beneath them. The madness of the war I still had not properly fought was infecting me: from this elevation I imagined how the land down there on the plain would appear from the air, what it would be like to fly over it at night and drop bombs and incendiaries on the people who lived there.

Then, after dark, the race back to the airfield.

That week I was assigned to a new Wellington, A-Able, and began training hurriedly with the rest of the crew. We had waited so long that we were eager to throw ourselves into the campaign. We were not made to wait long. As I was an ‘experienced’ pilot, with eleven full sorties on my record, our first raid was against a target in Germany: an industrial area in the Ruhr valley. The next night, while we were still exhausted from the previous raid, we were sent to attack an airfield in Holland that had been taken over by the Luftwaffe. The following night we were sent out again.

Meanwhile, in the south of England, the Battle of Britain was growing in ferocity. British airfields and military bases were being attacked every day, while larger and more dangerous dogfights took place high above the Weald of Kent and the Downs. At last we were fully engaged with the enemy!

Leave became difficult to obtain while we were so intensively in action, so two or three weeks went by when not only did I not see Birgit, but I was hardly able even to think about her. She wrote to me every week: short, factual letters, with no hint of special affection, but informing me in a quiet away of her everyday concerns. One letter sent a small, guilty thrill through me: she told me that Joe had turned up unexpectedly at the weekend and stayed for three days before returning to London. That particular weekend was one when I had been angling for a two-day pass, but it was cancelled at the last moment. What might have happened if Joe had walked into the house when I was there, dressed up in his clothes, alone with his wife?

After the first rush of sorties, the powers-that-be must have realized that if we maintained that level of activity for long we would be too exhausted to function properly. Crews were therefore put on a duty rota: not a rigid timetable as such, but the staff officers worked it out so that each crew flew on average just over once a week, or about three times a fortnight. This more calculated use of resources continued for the rest of the war, disrupted whenever Bomber Command demanded ‘maximum effort’ for certain targets. From my own point of view, it meant that most weeks, with careful planning and a bit of luck, I could arrange a thirty-six-hour pass, or even a whole weekend away.

Birgit and I soon settled into a kind of cautious familiarity, even though I had to be away from her so often, for so long. I would try to take her little extras that I knew were difficult for her to find or afford: tins of meat, powdered egg, chocolate, coffee, sometimes a few pieces of fresh fruit, all scrounged from the base. There was little she could give me in return, but my satisfaction lay in seeing her starting to look better. She put on a little weight, her face lost its haggard look, she seemed less careworn, less despairing. She remained unhappy without Joe, and she was still scared of being rounded up by the authorities, but I was beginning to sense a hopeful future for her. She looked increasingly beautiful to me. I was obsessed with her.

One weekend in September, while I slept as usual on the ancient armchair in her parlour, Birgit woke me up. I opened my eyes, saw her in the dim light spilling into the room from the hallway. She was kneeling beside me, her face close to mine. Her cold fingers were resting on my arm and her long hair brushed against my cheek.

‘I can’t sleep, JL,’ she said, her voice wavering as she shivered. ‘It’s so lonely upstairs.’

I swung myself from the chair and stood up. I took her in my arms and instantly we were kissing and caressing each other passionately. Her mouth bruised against mine. She forced herself against me so vigorously that I almost fell backwards. I was still half asleep. I had not planned or expected what we started. Dreaming of it and hoping for it were not the same. It simply started to happen and afterwards I did not try to justify it to myself. We became ardent lovers, delirious with a desire for each other that we could scarcely satisfy. For the remainder of that short weekend we left her bed only for brief spells: food, bathroom visits, then back to our nest and our frantic love-making.

The single most difficult thing I have done in my life was to part from Birgit at the end of that leave. I delayed until the last possible moment, then rode at headlong speed along silent roads to the base. The following night our squadron flew to the port of Antwerp, where the Germans had amassed many invasion barges.

September and October went by slowly, the war becoming more bitter and destructive in every direction. After two or three weeks of effective bombing attacks against British airfields, the Germans inexplicably changed tactics. Had they continued to hit our airfields, they might well have overcome us, but they shifted their attention to bombing the cities, in particular to bombing London, and inadvertently they spared the RAF. The military benefits were not realized for several months, because in the short term the change in tactics meant that ordinary members of the public were now in the front line. Night after night the Luftwaffe bombers droned in above London and indiscriminately released hundreds of bombs on residential areas. Soon they were making for other cities, bringing a feeling of imminent danger to everyone in the country. Nowhere was safe from the raids.

Joe was still in London, working for the Red Cross. We heard little about what he was doing, except indirectly. Red Cross workers gained occasional mention in the newspapers or on the wireless. It was clear they were in the thick of events. Concern about Joe’s well-being was a constant in my life, but as the Blitz worsened, the damage to the cities increased, the deaths mounted, Birgit became obsessed with his safety.

Even so, our passionate affair continued. I went to see her when I could and after the first few times I no longer worried if Joe might be at home when I arrived, or that he might arrive when I was there. All pretence that I was visiting Birgit for her company or to tackle repairs around the house was abandoned. We were lost in our fervent, passionate need for each other.

Then, suddenly, it changed. One day, at the beginning of November 1940, I received a message from the adjutant’s office that there had been a long-distance telephone call for me, from Mrs Sawyer. She had left a number for me where I could contact her. Full of alarm, I raised the operator and booked the call, person-to-person. Within half an hour Birgit and I were speaking and she told me the news straight away: Joe was dead. He had been killed in London when a German bomb hit the Red Cross ambulance he was driving.

22

Joe’s body was cremated after a secular ceremony in Gloucester. The service of remembrance consisted of a reading of a poem by Wilfred Owen and an extract from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Joe’s short life was described in moving terms by a man from the Quaker Society of Friends. Joe was not a Quaker, but apparently his work had brought him into contact with Meetings in Manchester and London. The speaker described Joe as friend to the Friends. Mrs Alicia Woodhurst, who was Joe’s boss at the British Red Cross Society in Manchester, gave an emotional account of the quietly heroic rescue work he had been carrying out in the Blitz in London. Birgit, standing next to my father, leaning on his arm, sobbed all the way through. I, standing next to my mother, my arm around her shoulders, was stiff with grief and the sudden realization of loss, inexplicable and final. Afterwards, when we returned to my parents’ house, Birgit would not look at me or speak to me. I was thankful she would not. Waves of guilt consumed me. I was devastated, shocked, deeply depressed by Joe’s death, but as well I felt sick at heart when I thought about my affair with Birgit, behind his back, in his bed, dressing up as him to delude his neighbours, taking his place in his own house. Of course, of course!, Birgit and I could not have known or guessed what was going to happen perhaps we would not have been deterred by the foreknowledge if we had - but even so. We did what we did, but now that we had done it we were left to agonize in a mire of guilty feelings. The squadron had given me eight days’ compassionate leave and my parents pleaded with me to stay with them for the whole of that time. I was there at their house on the night after the funeral, but the next day I could stand it no more. I hopped on Robbie Finch’s motorbike - which had become mine ever since a raid on Cuxhaven, two weeks before, during which Robbie and his crew bailed out over Germany and were now prisoners of war - and headed back to Tealby Moor as quickly as I could. What happened next made sense only in the callous context of wartime. Joe’s death was the worst and most emotional experience of my life and for a time I thought I might never recover from the complex feelings of guilt, lost love and misery. But wars are filled with deaths, both remote and close at hand. Every night that the Luftwaffe bombers came to a British city, thousands of people were injured or killed. Ships were being sunk at sea with frightful loss of life, sickening news that came in daily. And every time the aircraft of our squadron, or of any of the front-line squadrons, took off for Germany, inevitably there was a loss to contend with in the morning. Some mornings there were several losses. Four of our Wellingtons were destroyed in a single night in a raid on Bremerhaven in December of that year, a disaster within the squadron, demoralizing and depressing us all, but the young men who died were simply more to be added to the war’s tally. We never became blasé about death or immune to its shock, but as the war went on we grew to accept that deaths were the price we were paying. This was the context; this was the world in which Joe had died.

For me, the war was the only distraction I had from my private troubles. Now that the heady affair with Birgit had been taken from me, I gave myself up entirely to fighting the war. In doing so I realized the danger in which I had inadvertently been placing my crew. Those men were my closest friends and allies, yet for half the time I had been flying with them my mind had been on Birgit. I changed. I dedicated myself to war.

We went through the winter of 1940/41, one raid following another: Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Sterkrade, Düsseldorf. We learned what there was to learn about night bombing, but in that period of the war our techniques were crude and our successes uncertain. The only certainties were that we went out to Germany and that some of us never came back.

On May 10, 1941, after bombing the port and city of Hamburg, my aircraft A-Able became the latest plane from our squadron not to make it home and my crew the most recent to be posted missing or wounded.

23

Following the question-and-answer format suggested by Miss MacTyre, I wrote a shorter version of what I had learned about Rudolf Hess during my visit to Mytchett Place. The typewritten copy prepared in her office then went straight to the P.M., with copies of that and the full version sent to the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Admiralty and the War Ministry. All those copies, short or long, vanished into the government labyrinth.

Of all the actions in which I was involved during the war, preparing my report on Hess seemed the most important, certainly at the time and still, in some ways, even now. There for a few days, by what seemed like happenchance, I was acting as a kind of intermediary between two of the most powerful men in Europe, investigating one of them for the other, with whatever conclusions I drew being likely to affect the way the war would be conducted. That is how it felt at the time.

Yet in the end my work made no difference, or none that I could discern. The war continued and what I had discovered about Hess appeared to have no impact on it. Perhaps that was what Churchill wanted. With post-war hindsight I realize that the presence of Hess in Britain must have been a serious embarrassment to the British government: as soon as Stalin found out that Hess had landed in Scotland, he leapt to the conclusion that Britain and Germany were conducting secret negotiations. In papers released by Churchill soon after the end of the war it was revealed that at this time Britain was putting a great deal of effort into reassuring Stalin that the Anglo-Russian alliance was intact. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was in full flow at the same time as I was at Mytchett Place, with the Red Army retreating on every front.

Those published papers never included anything that even remotely resembled my findings. I have always been curious about why this might be, since what I discovered about Hess should have thrown everyone’s assumptions about him into turmoil. At first I assumed it was simply the way governments worked, but once I made serious efforts to find out what happened after I met Hess I realized that there must have been a decision to cover up the details.

Because I am telling my own story, not an official one, I don’t feel bound by the political imperatives of half a century ago. Although I can’t locate the original report I wrote, I do vividly remember the meetings, and because I have kept my own handwritten notes from which the report proper was typed I can reproduce a fair copy of it here. My days with Hess were long and often tedious, with many interruptions, distractions and obscurities. He often confused me and frequently annoyed me, but for a lot of the time he simply bored me. My report boiled everything down to the salient facts, thanks to Miss MacTyre’s advice. Some details might have become blurred by the passage of time, but the main conclusion is identical to the one I reported to Churchill in 1941. This report is still an accurate summary of what I discovered.