Sandlands (13 page)

Then it is gone; the train has gone. The shockwaves subside and the air is still again. Away to my right the signal falls. I am aware that I am cold.

I turn for the gate; I turn for home.

Halfway up the hill, in the shelter of the willow trees, I stop, transfixed. I feel it – I feel her, my daughter. Inside the circle of my womb, I feel her shift and turn. One kick.

No more running now. I lace my fingers close about my belly and inhale the sunlit, ice-edged morning air, my breathing deep and steady. I'll be all right; we'll be all right.

I walk towards home. It's very simple, really. It's just a case of putting one foot in front of the other.

One

two

three

four

It was a perfect morning for cycling. The temperature must have fallen during a clear night and a dawn mist had formed over the fields. As Poppy bowled along Tunstall Lane it rose in layers, which seemed to lift and peel away without losing any of their density, and hung just clear of the barley so that sunlight filtered through underneath, tingeing them from below with watery gold. Once through Tunstall village and out on the road that stretched straight ahead into Rendlesham Forest, she rose on her pedals in her battered trainers, pushing down harder with each stroke, enjoying the stretch in her calves and the rush of cool air in her lungs, until the dark trees on either side were no more than a blur. 

Perfect for plant-hunting, too, with dew still freshening the leaves, and the flower heads yet to fade and fall.

She locked up her bike by the main gate, still crowned with its scrolls of military barbed wire, and walked across the tarmac towards the cluster of mismatched, low-lying buildings, outlines only against the slant of morning sun. From amid the dazzle there emerged a figure which she had to squint to make out: clad in a blue serge flying jacket, he could have walked straight from any decade of the base's existence, from the forties to the nineties.

‘Hi!' Poppy hailed him as he drew nearer. ‘Which is it? Film extra, or ghost?'

The boy laughed – or if he was a man it was a boyish laugh. Then again, it could have been the uniform that marked him down as young. The pilots of Bomber Command, who flew from here and died in Germany and Holland or in the dark North Sea, had mostly just been boys. ‘Neither, actually. I work at the Cold War Museum, over in the old command post. Just as a volunteer, you know, but we like to look the part.'

She'd bet they did. So no ghost, then, but only an aircraft enthusiast – a plane spotter with an upmarket anorak. Perhaps even a war enthusiast, she thought with a sinking heart – though she'd been picturing the wrong war.

‘How about you?' He had stopped beside her and turned; the silhouette acquired colour and definition, and she took in sandy brows over flecked hazel eyes. ‘Have you come to see the museum?'

It was her turn to laugh this time. ‘No – not that. No, I've actually come to look for a flower.'

A war enthusiast, perhaps, but he did have nice eyes. Words came tripping back from a song her mum used to sing to her at bath time when she was a kid.
Gone for soldiers, every one
. And then, close at their heels, another line:
When will they ever learn
?

 

A member of the public had phoned it in. All too often, she'd been sent on a wild goose chase (though not as literally as in the case of her colleague, Andy the bird man) by an excited and well-meaning caller, but this time it had the ring of credibility about it.
Silene conica
– the sand catchfly or striped corn catchfly. To many people it might be just another member of the campion family, an insignificant roadside weed, but for anyone who knew anything at all about native plants, or had opened a basic field guide, there was little chance of error. Those distinctive striated seed heads, fat and onion-domed, like extravagant turbans or the minarets of old Istanbul: there really could be no mistaking them.

The woman had sounded plausible – confident but not overbearing – and the habitat was right, too. Next to the old runway, she said, near where there'd been some recent digging.
Silene conica
favoured sandy soils in coastal regions: dunes and the landward margins of beaches, or the light, well-draining soil of the Suffolk sandlings. It grew most readily in bare or sparsely vegetated areas and had a particular liking for ground that had been disturbed by man. Like me, she thought, like my own name. The poppies of Flanders.

 

‘A flower?' The sandy eyebrows lifted a quizzical half-centimetre.

‘I'm a botanist,' she said, trying to block out the note of apology, or at least of self-consciousness. ‘I work for the county Wildlife Trust.' As if by way of credentials, she unzipped her backpack to reveal the camera and the roll of plastic warning tape, fluorescent orange zigzagged with black.

‘More like SOCO.'

‘Sorry?'

The costume airman nodded at the contents of her pack. ‘Like on the telly. A police officer, you know. Come to seal off the scene of the crime.'

‘I hope not.' She was grinning, but it was no joke, really, the damage people did, deciding to pick wild flowers. ‘Quite the reverse. I want to protect it, if it's what we think it is. Look—' He seemed a willing sort, and his job was helping visitors, wasn't it? ‘I wonder if you might be able to point me in the right direction. Our informant said it's growing by the main runway. Maybe somewhere they've been doing some excavation?'

Turning to peer screw-eyed into the sun, back in the direction of the buildings, he gave a nod. ‘For the remains of a Lanc.' At her hesitation, he looked back towards her. ‘A Lancaster bomber. From a wartime crash.'

That would be it, she supposed. ‘So, whereabouts...?'

He swung on the heels of his flying boots. ‘I'll show you.'

 

It was
Silene conica
. Just a small, scattered colony, no more than a dozen flowering spikes, close to some mounds where the earth had evidently been turned over and then piled back.

‘Oh, wow!' Poppy yelped with delight. ‘It's actually it. Sand catchfly is its name. This is the first time it's been spotted here on the base, though they've had some on the reserve at North Warren, and up at Minsmere, too, just a few specimens. It's pretty scarce – fewer than sixty sites recorded nationwide last year...'

He wasn't really listening. His eyes had strayed towards the perimeter fence, the wire mesh and concrete pillars, tilted outwards at the top to support three parallel strands of razor wire.

‘I came here when I was a baby,' she said, caught off balance herself by the sudden change of tack. ‘In a papoose, and then in a buggy, later on. My mother was a peacenik, back in the eighties. CND and all that.'

Ban the
bomb
. Mum's placard was self-consciously retro, even then, among the others with their
No nukes!
and
Send
Maggie on a cruise
. Funny to think the familiar photos in the album back at home were taken somewhere out along that fence, just outside the wire. To think of what was happening inside the wire then, too – so secret, so deadly – and now she could walk in the front gate and stroll about photographing flowers.

There was one particular snap she'd always loved: it showed her mother gazing dreamily half away from the camera, hair loose about her shoulders and topped with a daisy chain, the perfect hippy chick, like something out of Woodstock in 1969. And she was in the picture, too, baby Poppy at a few months old, although you couldn't see her face, which was hooded by the shawl which bound her, squaw-style, to her mother's body. Except it wasn't a shawl, exactly, but one of those Middle Eastern scarves, a
keffiyeh
– worn, no doubt, in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, but strangely at odds with the floral skirt and Indian cheesecloth blouse, the strings of wooden beads and threaded seashells. Behind Mum's head, in and out of the mesh of the fence, were woven posies of flowers – cranesbill and scabious and meadow clary and more she couldn't identify from the fuzzy photograph – like people leave at the roadside, on a fence or lamp post, at a place where a child has been knocked down and killed.

‘Well, they've all gone now.'

She blinked at the young volunteer and slowly nodded her head, uncertain quite what she was agreeing had gone: the American bombers, the peace protestors or the flowers.

 

* * *

 

It was a perfect morning for cycling. Overhead the larks were already peppering the sky with their barrage of twittering as Lilian bowled along the Tunstall Lane. The temperature must have fallen during a clear night and a dawn mist lingered over the fields. The pilots in last night's raids would have had a good sight of their targets, but been sitting ducks for the enemy ack ack; she hoped that any stragglers had managed to land before the mist had formed. When she reached the road that stretched straight ahead into the cool darkness of Rendlesham Forest, Lilian rose on her pedals in her old lace-up brogues, which she'd had since school and weren't fit to be seen but were the only thing she owned you could possibly ride a bike in. She'd always raced when she got to the woods, right from being small, fleeing from storybook bogeymen even before there were Nazi spies and paratroopers to haunt the edges of the imagination.

She propped up her bike by the main gate and walked past the barrier, keeping her eyes down as the corporal on guard duty glanced up from his
Picture Post
to give the compulsory wolf whistle. At least there would be no whistling in the mess – the commissioned officers were too well-bred for that, even now that the cumulating losses meant they were recruiting pilots from all sorts of walks of life. She'd shared a smoke with one last week who'd been a brewer's drayman back in civvy street. ‘I've swapped four hooves for four props,' he'd said, as he leaned in to light her cigarette. ‘But I know which I'd rather be relying on, if it comes to limping home on three.'

It wasn't to say they didn't look, though – men are men, her mum always told her, and even officers have eyes. Some of them liked to rib her, too, and try to make her blush; Lilian hated how easily she blushed. She wasn't a child, after all, she was seventeen. Boys she'd been at school with were out in Italy and North Africa now, driving tanks, or down in submarines and goodness knows what else, and she was doing her bit, as far as you could, stuck out here in Suffolk, helping on the farm now that Arthur and Geoff were gone, and cleaning the mess hut and cookhouse at the base. Seventeen – but she knew she must look younger in her well-worn cotton print dress, let out on the bust and hips and down at the hem until there were no seams left to turn. On mornings like this, after a raid, the pilots rose late and would still be lingering over a second mug of tea while she got going with her bucket and mop; she tucked in her tummy and pushed out her breasts in the new brassiere she'd had from Auntie Vi in London, a proper bullet bra that made her feel like Veronica Lake, until she had to put on her old dress and cardigan, and her flat school brogues.

There was one particular one: the others called him Charlie, which baffled her at first, but it turned out his plane was C for Charlie and his real name was Joe. He had blond hair that flopped down over his forehead however much he tried to slick it back, and greyish, greenish eyes. Nice eyes. Joseph Woodhall was his full name – she loved how it sounded – and he came from a place called Market Drayton in Shropshire. It was so near to Wales, he said, that on a quiet Sunday you could hear the singing. Joe was always saying things like that, funny things, so she never quite knew if he was joking or not. He reckoned it was 192 miles by road from Market Drayton to Bentwaters, or 170 as the Lancaster flies, which meant they could get there in forty-five minutes at normal cruising speed, have a pot of coffee and a chocolate Kunzle cake in the Red Lion Hotel, and be back in time for lunch.

‘Go on with you,' she said.

‘Don't fancy it? Ah well, you may be wise. They're mainly beetroot and gravy browning, anyway.'

‘Mainly...?' Confused, she was probably beetroot herself.

‘The Kunzle cakes.'

It wouldn't do to look round for him – wouldn't do to be looking round at the officers at all, bold as brass the way some girls would. That's not how Lilian had been brought up. But she could sneak a quick glance about while she fetched her bits and pieces from the closet, and there he was, playing cards with T for Tommy.

When she went round the back to empty her bucket at the outside drain the way Sergeant Bulmer liked her to do, Joe was suddenly there behind her, up so close she could smell the rolling tobacco, and something harsher, like carbolic. And somehow he'd got hold of flowers – a great overflowing bunch of them like a proper bouquet from the florist, as if she'd know what to do with flowers when she was meant to be cleaning. Except they weren't real flowers, of course, not the hothouse kind or even from someone's garden, they were just wild flowers he must have gone out and picked earlier. Weeds, really, her mum would say. But they were all colours, bright as you like. The blue ones she knew were cornflowers, but she didn't know the other sorts.

‘Call yourself a country girl?' he teased her. He seemed to know them all, and the names as he reeled them off to her were so beautiful it was just as if he was reading her poetry: knotted cranesbill and corn chamomile, arrowgrass and fragrant agrimony, musk mallow, ragged robin, wild marjoram and mignonette.

 

* * *

 

It was a perfect morning for cycling. Rosa loved those days in early summer when a clear night left a trail of dawn mist to be burned off by the brand new sun. The sort of days, she thought as she bowled along the Tunstall lane, when you almost couldn't believe how fragile all this was, this beautiful, precarious balance of gases and liquids, or water and air, of soil and plants and animals which sustained the life of this planet of ours. It was hard to remember that the sun might one day, perhaps one day soon, be blotted out by a lethal poison cloud unleashed by the gigajoules of explosive power, the limitless megatons of chemical death, stockpiled on either side of the Berlin Wall – including at Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth, even if not yet here at Bentwaters.