A Future Arrived (51 page)

They found him braced in the galley opening, one hand pressed to his side. Leading Aircraftman Clark lowered the canvas cot from its bracket along the bulkhead and Flight Sergeant Burns eased Colin onto it and began to unbutton his jacket.

“Heck,” Colin said. “I'm okay, boys. Little … tired.”

“Sure, Skip,” Burns said. “Let's just get the old jacket off.”

There was only a small hole between two ribs and not much bleeding. Sergeant Burns patched it thickly with gauze. “Be right as rain, Skip.”

But he was already dead.

I
T IS A
summer of high, blue skies etched with the white traceries of vapor trails. Slowly moving arcs and loops so high above, viewed from summer gardens in Kent and Surrey, the South Downs and the Weald.

Death in the skies, in the cold, thin air. A line of smoke against the cirrus, trailing down. A black dot … a machine …

One of ours, you think?

A nineteen-year-old boy in the seat, dead, plunging to earth.

Or one of theirs?

Men in white flannels still play cricket in the long shadows of Saturday afternoons. There is tea and toast waiting at Kentish Hill when the Spitfires drop in one by one over the trees, low on fuel, out of ammunition, smoke staining the wings. Honey still for tea. And then up again before the sun sets. To the clouds. To the murderous sky.

TODAY'S SCORE

US 68 THEM 6

The newspapers deliberately exaggerate German losses so as to help British morale. The battle is not a lopsided rout of the many by the few. The losses mount day by endless day throughout August and into September. Fighter Command is not winning, but they are not losing either. They continue to exist. To the dismay of the German bomber crews there are always the slim, deadly little fighters slashing into their formations as soon as they cross the coast. There can be no invasion of England until they are total masters of the sky.

“The English are filled with curiosity and keep asking: ‘Why doesn't he come?' Be calm. Be calm. He's coming! He's coming!”
says Hitler in a speech in Berlin, in a rare moment of humorous sarcasm.

But he is not coming. There is no humor to be found in the attrition over England. In the fifty-six planes downed by the RAF on September 15 alone. No humor to be found in the French and Belgian channel ports where the invasion barges are being bombed every night. Hitler cancels all plans to land troops in England. He turns his eyes eastward and pores for hours over maps of the vast steppes of Russia. England he will punish by air—at night only. Bomb the cities. Burn the towns.
Gott strafe England
.

The Battle of Britain is over. The Blitz begins.

LONDON CAN TAKE IT!

The editorial room here at the
Daily Post
was bombed last night, gutted by incendiaries, but we are carrying on. Business as usual. We are like Archie Potts of Cheapside. Archie runs a little shop in Winders Lane. He sells men's boots and ladies' shoes. He, too, was bombed last night. On the frame of his blown-out shop window he attached a small sign this morning. “Archie's,” it reads. “More Open than Usual.”

Hello, America. This is Martin Rilke speaking to you from London. It is midnight here and an air raid that began at seven thirty this evening is still going on. There are Nazi bombers flying high over the city, over the great docks lining the Thames from Tilbury to Wapping, over East End slums and Mayfair mansions. I will bring the sounds of this raid to you in a moment, recorded with our wire recording machines a few hours ago from the roof of Broadcasting House, in Portland Place. You will hear the sharp bark of the anti-aircraft guns, the rolling thunder of the bombs. You will even hear, if you listen closely, the sound of a Nazi plane high over the city—a Heinkel one-eleven—my guest for this broadcast, RAF Squadron Leader Derek Ramsay, Distinguished Flying Cross, assures me. What you will not hear, what cannot be captured on magnetized wire, is the sound of the heart of a courageous people. A people living with the fear of death night after night. Never knowing when they go to the shelters if they will have a home to go back to when the raid is over. And the bombs spare no one. They fall just as readily on the crowded row houses of Stepney and Bethnal Green as they did on Buckingham Palace last week. The little man, the king, all going about their day-to-day business knowing they could well be dead that night. It is the mettle of a people, the spirit of a race. It is England.

C
HARLES
G
REVILLE TOOK
the train up from Dorset and his father met him at Abingdon station. Charles was surprised at how well he looked, the bounce to his step, the strength in his handshake.

“Have you seen the place yet?” he asked.

Lord Stanmore nodded vigorously. “Drove down early. Been puttering about for hours, chatting with the fire brigade chaps and the staff. They had a frightening time—staff, I mean, not the fire brigade.
They
enjoyed themselves hugely.”

The Pryory had been blitzed the night before. A stick of bombs had tumbled down in darkness and light rain and two had slammed into the east wing and one into the stables. The rest had fallen across the lawns and into the kitchen garden. No one had been injured and there had been no horses in the stalls.

“Jettisoned,” the earl said as he hurried Charles to the car. “That's the opinion of the firemen, anyway. Some Hun in a blue funk let ‘em drop before scooting for home.”

“Doubt it,” Charles said. “Probably aiming for the Blackworth plant.”

“But that's eight miles away, dear boy.”

“The type of error one could make on a dark night at twenty thousand feet.”

“Perhaps so. Still, hardly matters, does it? The old house has been bombed. That's the main thing. Felt you should see it as well as me. Your ruddy house one day, you know.”

“I doubt if I'd ever live in it.”

“Who are you to break tradition? Been an earl of Stanmore living there since God knows when. You'll see. You, your lovely Marian, and my little grandson will reside there yet. And a better house it will be, too. I have some excellent ideas in my head. Never really liked that wing of the house too much. Gone now. Blown and burnt to rubble. Chance to start from scratch and build something really grand one day.”

Charles smiled to himself as he got into the back of the car. Nearing eighty and still making plans. Hope springs eternal.

“Bought some flowers on the way. From that hothouse chap in Leatherhead. Always bring some when I come down with your mother. She would have come today, but I felt it would be too painful for her. Lord knows there are enough bombed-out houses for her to look at from our windows in London.”

“You should move out of there, Father.”

“William and Dulcie tell me the same. If the king doesn't see fit to run I don't see why I should.”

The Rolls-Royce glided up the High Street and stopped opposite the church. The rain was gentle, a floating mist drifting through the branches of the leafless elms in the rectory garden. Charles helped his father from the car as the chauffeur opened an umbrella.

The earl waved it aside with contempt. “I don't need a bloody bumbershoot, man.”

“Her ladyship …”

“Made you promise,” he said in resignation, taking it from him. “If that woman has her way I'll live to Methuselah's age.”

They walked along the gravel path, the earl holding the umbrella in one hand and a bunch of flowers wrapped in newspaper in the other. There were many old headstones rising from the lush grass, sheened with moss, the inscriptions weathered and worn. There were new stones, startlingly white against the vivid greens. They stopped by one of them.

COLIN MACKENDRIC ROSS

1920–1940

Per ardua ad astra

“He would have liked that, I believe,” the earl said, unwrapping the flowers. “The motto of the RAF. He was proud being in it. Not a patriot as such. Not love of king and country, Lord knows.”

“Just Colin,” Charles said quietly, taking the flowers from his father and placing them on the mound of wet grass.

D
EREK
R
AMSAY TURNED
his battered motorbike into Fern Lane and pulled to a screeching halt in front of a whitewashed stone cottage. His usually neat uniform was wrinkled and black with rain after a furious drive from Kentish Hill. Valerie had heard the sound of his approach and opened the door before he could fish the latch key from his pocket.

“Bloody hell!” he said angrily as he stepped inside.

“Delightful greeting, I must say. My first forty-eight-hour leave in weeks and you arrive late and pleasant as a bear.”

He bent to her, kissing her firmly on the lips. “Sorry. Not quite myself. The powers that be shot me a rocket and I'm just blowing off steam.”

“Oh? What happened?”

Removing his sodden hat, he tossed it toward a peg on the wall, missing by a foot. “They bumped me up to wing commander.
Wing commander!
To a bloody
training
command! An inspiration to the new lads, they told me. Paterfamilias to the fledging brood of Fighter Command … a bloody scoutmaster!”

“Calm down,” she said, holding him, feeling giddy with relief. Selfish of her she knew, but he had done so much during the desperate summer. Ribbons on his chest. Fifteen German planes shot down. But she knew the terror of his nights. The sudden cries and twitching limbs as he relived in his dreams each terrible fight. “I can't think of a better choice for the job, Derek.”

“And something else. Hush-hush at the moment. I could be sent to America some time next year … to Arizona and Texas. The Yanks may lend us bases there to train our pilots. If that happens, what about us?”

She smiled into his troubled eyes and ran her fingers across his mouth. “I shall stay here, do my job—and keep on loving you. Exulting in the joy of being
Mrs
. D. Ramsay.”

“You heard from Raymond through the Red Cross?”

“No, but I did hear
of
him. A chap on De Gaulle's staff phoned me from London. Raymond isn't a POW and never was. He's in Vichy, an aide to Laval. I knew his father's Fascist friends would take care of him.”

Derek looked puzzled. “I don't see how that can be of any great use to us.”

“I will write a letter, a very charming letter, and send it to Raymond via the Swiss chargé d'affaires in Vichy. In it I will tell him that I have no objection to
his
divorcing
me
, realizing as I do what an embarrassment it would be to him if it were known that his wife is a sergeant in the Royal Air Force! That should do it, don't you think? Deliciously uncomplicated.”

“Clever little girl, aren't you?”

“Clever enough to have found you, Fat Chap.”

“A mutual cleverness,” he said, holding her tightly, breathing in her delicate perfume. Savor every second, he was thinking as he kissed her. Etch them into memory for the long days ahead.

V
ICTORIA CARRIED THE
one suitcase they shared between them and held Jennifer by the hand as she pushed and shoved her way toward the ticket counter at Euston Station.

“Two first-class returns to Liverpool, please.”

“Is this journey really necessary, miss?”

Victoria glared imperiously at the little man behind the wicket. “Of course it's necessary. Would anyone go to Liverpool if it weren't?”

“Sorry, miss. Have to ask, you know.”

The carriage was nearly filled, stuffy and dim.

“A seat by the corridor would be best for you,” Victoria said.

Two naval officers occupied those seats. They both noticed Jennifer's drawn face and obvious pregnancy and gave them up gallantly. Victoria flashed them a devastating smile. “Knew the navy would come through.”

“Think nothing of it,” one of them said.

“My husband's in the navy … Lieutenant Commander Gerald Smith Blair. He's serving on
Rodney
. Perhaps you know him.”

“Afraid not. But meeting his wife is pleasure enough.”

“What a charming thing to say.”

Jennifer gave her a poke in the ribs and whispered, “Stop flirting, for heaven's sake.”

“It's quite harmless,” Victoria whispered back. “And it helps pass the time.”

Liverpool in the afternoon was dark and smoky. There had been a raid the night before and an oil tank still burned at Birkenhead, the black smoke rolling across the Mersey in the wind. The two naval officers, who had been laughing and joking with Victoria for the entire journey, made themselves useful by practically commandeering one of the few available taxis, and they rode with them as far as the Adelphi Hotel.