Sandlands (22 page)

It was from Sarah's boy Will, more than fifty years later, that I found out they were rooks, not crows. ‘A rook by itself is a crow, Grandad,' he said, ‘but a crow with other crows is a rook.' It's the way to tell them apart, apparently, though Mother never knew and we called them all crows, growing up. They roosted in the stand of horse chestnuts on the edge of Willett's farm, down near the level crossing. Still do. And Mother always reckoned that they brought good luck – or, if good luck was a stretch too far, that at least they warded off the bad. A sort of talisman, I suppose, like the ravens at the Tower of London, keeping England safe. I don't think we believed her, even back then. But that's why Johnnie was never to shoot them, even later when the war came and shop-bought food was short.

At the base we had plenty, mind you, even though it was grey and swimming in grease, so it could have been pork or beef or leg of ruddy Labrador. ‘Snake and kidney', some wags used to call it, and chalk out the ‘n' in ‘mince'; real toads, they'd claim, in the toad-in-the-hole. Those boys in the mess tent couldn't cook. Most had been office clerks before the war, or schoolboys whose mothers packed their bread and dripping. Townies, a lot of them, who'd never seen a cow and wouldn't know her topside from her teats.

It was at the base that Johnnie picked up that crazy talk of his. Stone the crows, he'd say, and jumping Jehoshaphat, and everything'd be tickety-boo one week and whiz-bang-a-bang the next. Mother wouldn't have him using profanities, though, not in her hearing. There were boys down at Martlesham Heath from all over: Jocks and Irish lads and even Aussies, though no Yanks yet, of course – that was later. Slang was passed around like dirty pictures, and I think he picked it up at the movies as well. Johnnie loved the movies. They used to put them on in one of the hangars every Friday night, if we weren't scrambled. Errol Flynn was Johnnie's favourite, and he could do him to a tee. After a few beers he'd do Katharine Hepburn, too, and even Shirley Temple.

He started at the base before me, but only by a matter of months, although he was six years older. They soon needed every man they could get, and I was flying before I was nineteen. Boys of eighteen, nineteen, seemed older back then; we felt ourselves worldly-wise. A year was a ruddy long time in the war.

Pilot Officers John and Philip Root. I still have the photograph, taken by a ginger corporal called Tug who had a camera – a decent bloke even if he was a pen pusher, a desk wallah: in the chairborne division, as we used to say. The two of us are pictured squinting into the sun in front of Johnnie's Spit. We're standing by one blade of the prop and behind us is a section of the wing and the riveted underbelly of the fuselage. Johnnie's battle blues are all untucked, his cap tipped behind one ear at a rakish angle; the Wingco would have had his guts for garters. Someone, I can't remember who, has printed our names and ranks along the bottom in spidery white capitals. It was Mother who put the photo in its frame, black lacquer with the moulding picked out in faded gilt, and it stood in pride of place on top of Father's bureau, beside the kitchen range.

I used to listen to the crows – that is to say, the rooks – squabbling and shouting up above me when I went to look for conkers. You couldn't see the birds through the canopy, not at conker time when the leaves were still on the trees: edged with fiery yellow but not yet fallen. But you could hear them all right. Mostly it's a lot of quarrelsome
caa caa caa
, but they also make a shorter, harsher ‘
tshk
' sound, a bit like a creaking spring. They seemed an unlikely sort of good luck charm to me, with their noisy flopping and flapping in the branches. They're ungainly birds on the ground, too. I remember watching them with Will last week, feeding among the stubble on Willett's big wheat field. Such awkward-looking creatures they are, with their bald faces and outsized beaks, that splay-footed walk they have and often with their feathers all awry. And, underneath, those comical, baggy black pantaloons.

It's the droopy drawers, according to Will, that's another sure sign they're rooks. His own adage, that a crow with others must be a rook, is only a very rough guide, he says. Crows will flock together to feed, and in family groups in spring. But it's only the rooks that form a proper colony like the one in Willett's horse chestnuts. In winter when the trees are bare, that's when you see them best, those great untidy thatches of sticks they build for nests, which look too big for the spindly upper branches that support them, and the birds gathered to roost, cut-out shapes against the sky. Still and silent in a December dusk, they do acquire some sort of dignity. Upright, hooded, they make me think then of brothers in some contemplative order, or watchmen standing guard. Or maybe of a crowd of mourners, hunched and frock-coated, gathered at a rainy graveside.

 

I knew I wanted to fly. I always knew, even before Johnnie joined up; even before that, when we were boys and it was me with the Biggles books and the picture of a Fairey Seafox on my bedroom wall out of
Practical Mechanics
. And when war looked likely, I knew it was a Spit or a Hurricane I wanted to fly, not a Wellington or a Lanc. There were bombing stations closer to home – over Rendlesham way at Bentwaters, and inland at Parham – but that was never for me.

You might put the choice down to simple cowardice, I suppose, although the boys who bought it in Fighter Command weren't noticeably fewer than among the bomber crews, especially in that late summer of 1940. If your number was up, it was up, whatever your mission and mob: that's how we all came to look at it. Death was no respecter of divisional demarcation, any more than of braid on a sleeve. But still... in a Spit you felt your life was just a little more in your own hands. With luck and a fair wind, you could dodge and dink and weave your way out of trouble nine times out of ten. And the tenth? Well, if I had to go west in a burning cockpit or a plummeting spiral of smoke, I'd sooner it was over friendly inshore waters or a patchwork of English fields.

What do they see when they look down, the circling rooks? It's a different world, up there on the wing. Most of the time on an op you didn't look down at all, except to get a fix on your position, and to peer for the flickering goosenecks that marked the runway on your way back in. But sometimes, just once or twice that I recall, when the expected German fighters were late to the party or things went suddenly quiet, there was time to take stock of things beyond the task in hand. Beyond the immediate skies around you, your gun sights, and staying alive. Once, we were scrambled in the late afternoon. It must have been August or September and the sun was already low, turning heaven and earth the same soft, luminous gold. We'd flown north, hugging the shoreline, but travelled no great distance, and it seemed to have been a false alarm: for once, we had the skies to ourselves. I took a long, looping turn to the west ahead of the others, coasting at about ten thousand feet, and an unexpected sense of peace settled over me. The goggles, the hot rubber of the oxygen mask, usually so encumbering, were temporarily forgotten. Even the roar and judder of the engine seemed to fade to a distance. There was nothing but me and my kite and the empty air.

Beneath me were fields, some dark and mottled with stubble, others the yellowish green of late summer pasture, all criss-crossed by the darker lines of hedgerows and studded here and there with the neat circle of a tree, as if a child had drawn round a sixpence. There were few clouds, and those few were mere puffs, drifting high above my own altitude, so that as I banked and then straightened from my turn, shadows flickered briefly across the Perspex canopy of the Spit, and ran and jumped over the tapestry below.

That other world, the solid world of soil and wood and hearth and home, was like a shadow of itself, a projection on a screen. It could have been a thousand miles away, or a thousand years. Nothing in that evening landscape moved to give it life and substance – until suddenly, beyond my left wingtip, a miniature figure swung into view, straddling the midline of a field where it changed from the dull grey-brown of stubble to a deeper, richer russet, ridged in black. At first I had no sense that the figure was in motion, so slowly did it creep along the line of the last furrow, edging forward no faster than a sluggish beetle, dazed by the sun. I took another turn, dropping my height a little, to gaze down until I could make out the broad backs of a pair of chestnut horses, the glinting Y-shape of the plough and, behind it, just visible, the dot of a man's head. Somewhere in the plunging fathoms of space between me and the ploughman a flock of birds were drifting, no doubt scanning the freshly upturned earth, appearing from my elevation as no more than a pattern of moving speckles. Maybe it was the timelessness of the image – with diesel so scarce in those days, it was not unusual to see farmers resorting to the old ways of working – or the perfect stillness of the gilded evening, split only by the rush of my own machine, but that momentary scene seemed to me somehow to be eternal, to be out of the reach of war, safe from the horrors of dogfights and ack ack, of air raids and bomb blast, of gunfire and shrapnel and burning and death.

 

Only once have I ever seen one up close enough to touch – a rook, that is, or possibly a crow. I don't think even Will could have said for certain, not after it had tangled with Johnnie's port side cannon mounting, coming in to land from an early patrol. ‘Lucky it didn't strike the prop,' I remember Johnnie saying, swinging the corpse by the legs like a chicken, and the Wingco whistled. ‘Lucky for which one of you?' he said. Its wings dangled out and down at drunken angles but the feathers held their gloss, shining blue and purple as well as black.

 

This afternoon Will came over and took me for a drive in that little Vauxhall of his. I don't get out as much as all that, since I've been in the Lilacs, but Will's a good boy and comes when he can. He knows I like to drive round by the old house and sometimes, like today, we stop for a half-pint at the Ship.

It was well after four when we started back and they like you to be in by five for tea. Early hours, they keep. We went round by the level crossing and Willett's farm, through Stone Common and up towards the church, and there, over Silly Hill, the sky was full of birds. Will saw me looking, and he was looking too; he pulled over on to the verge and we sat for a while to watch. The hedge was low just there but you still couldn't see the field, not from sitting in the car, so there's no knowing what it was that drew them. It must have been something, though: there were dozens of them, circling round and round above the crest of the hill.

I thought at first that it was just the rooks, because the wheeling outlines showed up black against the pale sky; the whiter flashes I caught as they turned I put down to a trick of the light. It takes my eyes much longer than it once did to adjust for distance, and accommodate to darkness, or brightness out of doors. I was passed twenty/twenty by the eye doc when I signed up, but I'd be no darned use for night ops now. After a minute or two, though, I got my sights trained in on them, and I could see they weren't all the same. There were two different colours there, black birds and white. Dark and light: friend or foe, good luck or bad. And two different wing shapes, as well. The rooks' wings were broad and straight, splay-tipped, while the other birds, which were grey on top and white below, were longer and more tapered in the wing, with an angle back towards the tail.

‘Black-headed gulls,' said Will.

On the walls of the Nissen hut, above our bunks, we had posters showing different fighter planes in silhouette. The Hawker Hurricane, the Spitfire. And the other lot, of course: the Heinkel He 112, the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Messerschmitt Bf 109. We had to be able to identify them in a fraction of a second, through cloud and haze, at dawn or dusk, or coming straight out of a blazing sun.

‘...except their heads are only black in summer,' Will was saying. ‘Or actually, even then, more like a very dark brown.'

The Heinkel's wings, according to the manuals, resembled those of an upside-down seagull – but in fact we rarely came across them. Once or twice, perhaps, in some early scraps, but after that it was always the Messerschmitts. They were nifty little craft, those 109s. They could dive away at the steepest angles and never seemed to stall – whereas with a Spit, if you pulled back too far the whole crate would start juddering or the engine cut out and you'd be forced to ease up. But our lot, both Hurricanes and Spits, were tighter in the circle. In a dogfight you could take a sharp turn to left or right and you'd soon shake the beggars off your tail.

The brow of Silly Hill was some way off from where Will had stopped the car, but when he wound the windows down we could hear the birds' cries carrying down on a gusty breeze: the low, rasping engine note of the rooks'
caa caa
and the higher pitched call of the gulls, which resembled no mechanical sound but had a piteous, almost human tone, like the distant voices of women and children, raised in inconsolable grief.

Was it a dogfight we were witnessing there over the hill? Were there battle patterns in the spiralling of the birds? You hear people talk about respect for the enemy, respect for our fellow flyers, but it wasn't like that. There was no time for respect, or hatred either. Your mind was a blank. Everything went into automatic. The control stick, the rudder pedals and the dials, the meshwork of tracer, the cross hairs of the sights and your thumb on the fire button. I hope Johnnie had no time to think.

It was early October, a Tuesday. A perfect English teatime, bright and breezy, much like today. We'd been sent to greet a formation of some twenty aircraft. Light bombers, mostly, with an escort of just half a dozen fighters, but those Dorniers were heavily armed and nearly as manoeuvrable as a 109. I'd been playing cat-and-mouse with one of the fighters; I'd got in a few short bursts but didn't think I'd hit him. Johnnie was somewhere off my starboard wing. The afternoon sky, in memory, was unbroken blue. There was no flame and no black smoke: just a pale plume, as innocent as vapour, trailing out behind, and the gleam of sunlight on my brother's plane as he fell like a stone.