The overnight snow had stopped; already a thaw was setting in. Indeed, as she watched, a slab of wet snow slid from the roof of the dormitory opposite and thudded to the ground, scattering a
small family of starlings drinking from a partly defrosted bird-bath underneath the eaves. James had been right. Spring was arriving, at last.
It had been quite impossible for him to drive back to Upminster the previous night; in fact, they’d had to abandon his car halfway from The Eagle and walk the rest of the way through the
snow to Girton. The porter was asleep when they reached the college so there was no difficulty in smuggling James back to her room. She’d wondered if he might try to kiss her – she
rather hoped he would, and perhaps go even further than that – but his behaviour had been exemplary. He’d turned his back while she undressed and climbed into bed, and then had insisted
she do the same while he disrobed, solemnly warning her that ‘the flames of passion may otherwise consume you, Diana, and you would pounce on me without shame or compunction’.
She had gone to sleep laughing under her breath.
Now, pouring boiling water into her small teapot and hurrying back to bed to listen to the news, she decided she was glad nothing had happened last night. That might have made his little speech
about ‘speeding things up’ seem self-serving and cynical. Clearly, he was better than that.
Two minutes later, she was shaking him awake.
‘James . . . James . . . wake up. You have to listen to this. It’s on the news. Germany’s invaded Denmark and Norway. It’s started.’
He rolled off the sofa in a single movement and crouched by the little radio. Diana noticed that he hadn’t quite taken all his clothes off the night before: he was still wearing a rather
frayed vest and long-johns. Thank God for small mercies, she thought to herself. Oh . . . perhaps not so small. She averted her eyes.
‘You’re bloody right,’ James said after a minute. ‘This is most definitely it.
Damn
. I should have tried to get back to base last night, after all.’
‘Don’t be silly, James, you’d have ended up in a ditch after the first two miles. Anyway, it’s thawing now. Get dressed and I’ll walk with you to the
car.’
Twenty minutes later, after strolling insouciantly past an outraged porter on the gate, Diana and James were standing in the slush next to the MG.
‘That porter isn’t going to get you into trouble, I hope?’ James asked her.
‘Not him,’ Diana laughed. ‘He’s got a soft spot for me. I’ll be fine.’
James hesitated. ‘Look . . . I’d hoped we’d at least have lunch before I had to go back,’ he said to her. ‘Every time I think we have a bit of time to get to know
each other, the bloody war sticks its nose in. I’m sick of it.’
She put scarlet-gloved hands on both sides of his face. ‘Me too. But we
have
got to know each other. We did last night at The Eagle. In fact, we got to know much more about each
other than we ever would’ve done without this stupid war; at least, I did about you. You were so honest and open.’
He pulled her to him. ‘I should have done this last night.’
That first kiss, an astonished Diana realised later, was the point at which, for the first time in her life, all her disparate parts dimly recognised each other. Her yearnings for a sense of
purpose, for love, for a child, for passion, were, for a few dizzying moments, almost unified.
Then James Blackwell was stepping back from her, smiling.
‘Diana, I don’t know when we’ll be able to see each other again,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone; I’ll write. It may be difficult, I may be in France or, God
knows, Norway. But I’ll come back to you, just as soon as I can. I promise.’
Then he was swinging into the bucket seat of the little car, the engine coughed into life, and he swerved and skidded away through the melting snow.
It was, he thought to himself as he crunched up a gear and joined the main road south, one of his more effective exits.
‘No, Dad, I don’t think any Spits are going to Norway, not that I’ve heard, anyway.’ John paused to sip his beer and shifted the mess phone to his other
ear.
‘Well, there’s a limit to what I can say, obviously,’ he went on. ‘Careless talk costs lives, and all that. But according to the papers, an aircraft carrier’s gone
over stuffed with Gladiators and Swordfish, although how those old bi-planes will manage against Hitler’s fast fighters is anyone’s guess. There’s talk about maybe sending some
Hurricanes too, which would even up the odds a bit. But we’ve had no orders. I think the general feeling is that Norway’s just “opening and beginners”, and the real scrap
will start, like last time, in France and Belgium. But we’re ready for him, Dad. In fact, James and I were saying last night that we wish it would kick off so we can get it over with.
Everyone here’s had quite enough of this endless stooging around.’
Mr Arnold, listening intentely on the other end of the line in his office in Holborn, knew exactly what his son meant. A quarter of a century ago, he too had fretted in a reserve division
stationed just behind the Western Front, desperate to go into action. Anything was better than living on jangling nerves, waiting for something to happen. Or at least, that’s what they had
all believed before they were marched up to the front line that first time. Things took on a very different perspective when you stood on the firing step in a flooded trench, waiting for the
whistle to blow to send you over the top and on your merry way. Very different indeed.
‘I understand, John,’ he said. ‘But it’ll start soon enough, believe you me. Do you think you might get some leave any time soon? No? I didn’t really think so.
Well, good luck, old son. Your mother and I think about you all the time. Yes . . . yes, I know you do. Bye for now, then . . . Yes, bye.’
He put the telephone carefully back on its receiver and stared out of the window towards the best view from his chambers, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. But, as so often these days,
Wren’s soot-blackened masterpiece failed to register in the smallest way. All he could see was his only son (still a boy, for all his carefully posed urbanity and hard-won professionalism)
strapping himself into his cockpit, pulling on his oxygen mask and taking off to do battle with the enemy. To die? Why not? War takes the skilled along with the stupid and those in between. He knew
that from the Somme.
Mr Arnold’s hands trembled slightly as he lit a cigarette. He could scarcely believe it had come to this, after the sacrifice and suffering last time: ‘the war to end all
wars’. What a pathetic joke that had turned out to be. All his darkest doubts and fears, which had made their first stealthy approach to him two summers before up on the Weald, were turning
into the bleakest of realities. He felt a wave of despair and hopelessness wash over him.
He found himself wishing his son suffered from poor sight, or deafness, or mathematical ineptness: anything to keep him from being chosen to fly in a front-line fighter squadron. John had
confided in his father, one evening when Gwen had gone to bed, that although the Spitfire was a remarkable aircraft, so were some of the enemy’s.
‘I’ll be honest with you,’ he said over a late-night brandy, ‘the new German fighters are as fast as ours and some of us think they’re better armed. They have
cannon; we’ve only got machine-guns. And their pilots have operational experience from the Spanish Civil War. We’re going to have to work bloody hard not to be caught on the hop. Not a
word to Mum or Diana, though.’
Mr Arnold glanced down at the evening paper his secretary had placed on the desk during the phone conversation with John. A large picture of Hitler dominated the front page and Mr Arnold
experienced an unexpected surge of loathing. It shook him: until now he’d mostly felt cold contempt for the man. This hot, violent hatred was new, almost animal in its intensity. If he could
have conjured the Nazi leader into existence before him he would have choked the life out of him with his bare hands then and there, without a solitary word or a moment’s compunction. The
blood sang in his ears.
This was no good. He needed to walk; he needed air. Mr Arnold called to his secretary in the outer office, ‘Laura, I’m going out for half an hour,’ and he could hear the tremor
in his voice. He walked quickly down the stairs and out onto a side street through a fire-door. His first thought as he headed towards St Paul’s, surrounded by its defending family of gently
bobbing barrage balloons, was of his daughter.
At least Diana was safe. Nothing, and no one, could touch her.
As Mr Arnold was grappling with unusually dark thoughts – unusual for him – James Blackwell was back at the Upminster aerodrome, also indulging in some rare
introspection. He almost never allowed himself the luxury of self-analysis. You were what you did, and what you did made you what you were. What was the point of trying to work out why? It
wouldn’t change the past and he was perfectly happy with his plans for the future; he always had been.
But in recent days something had begun to puzzle him, and now he lay smoking cigarette after cigarette on his bed in the small wooden hut that was part of the officers’ quarters, trying to
work through the conundrum.
Why wasn’t he afraid?
John was afraid, he’d admitted it to him a few days ago. So had some of the others, however obliquely. Even those who claimed they weren’t frightened of what was coming clearly were,
too. You could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, and their weak jokes.
But
he
– James Blackwell Esquire, of Whitechapel – wasn’t frightened at all. Not the slightest, tiniest bit. It wasn’t that he was unable to grasp the sheer
enormity of what was about to happen to them all. He knew perfectly well that he was shortly going to be asked to do something extraordinarily dangerous. The fact that he was one of the most
skilled pilots in the squadron gave him no extra sense of security.
Yes, he was undoubtedly what his instructors had called ‘a natural’ – someone who had an instinctive feel for an aircraft. Sometimes it almost seemed to him that his Spitfire
was an extension of himself; his arms and hands creeping and spreading into the curved wings on either side of him; his legs and feet somehow merging into and becoming part of the flaps and
controls that dictated the little plane’s height and direction.
But that was pure flying, not fighting. If he was ‘bounced’ by two or three enemy fighters at once, or even a single German pilot more skilled than himself, he’d be lucky to
get out of it alive. He knew that perfectly well.
But the prospect held no terrors for him. Neither did any of the other scenarios of doom that unwound like spools of film inside his head. Why?
Thinking about it, he asked himself, had he ever been afraid of anything? Not that he could remember. It occurred to him, for the first time in his life, that he had always seen himself remotely
from the outside and never from within.
James began to get excited. This nascent self-awareness was a completely new sensation to him and he felt a sudden conviction that if he could grasp the elusive truth about himself, whatever it
was, he might become even stronger.
He found himself thinking back to that evening with Diana in Cambridge, and his perfectly judged exit the following morning. And those last moments with Jane in the dress-shop in Upminster.
Then there was the final dénouement with his headmaster.
How he’d silently applauded himself after every scene! What did they remind him of? Something to do with his past. Dammit, he was so close! It was . . . it was . . . and then it burst
through into his consciousness like a sudden flash of sunlight from behind a swift-passing cloud.
Of course. The films his mother had let him watch at the Odeon, from as early as he could recall. The films that had formed his emerging view of the world. The solitary small boy had watched the
characters on the screen with an intensity that the tittering, whispering, chocolate-gobbling audiences surrounding him never did. But because the shades flickering before him were not real –
he had always known that, hadn’t he, even when he was what, four? – he had never cared about their pain, or their joy, or their fear. He had watched them dispassionately. But never
disinterestedly.
Sometimes he had seen the same film five or six times in a single week. Then he had come to feel he was following the characters as closely as their own shadows, and, because he knew exactly
what was about to befall them, it was almost as if he was controlling them, nudging them toward their destinies. It didn’t matter whether they were heroes or villains; all that counted was
how their inner characters and outward actions dictated their fate. Glamorous; ruthless; successful . . . James had never cared about what defined them. Even if they were ultimately doomed, it was
their unfolding stories that counted above everything else.
‘That’s what I do now,’ he whispered to the empty hut. ‘I direct. I’m the sodding director of my own life and everyone else who’s part of it. Of course
I’m not afraid. Why would a director be afraid for one of his actors? And that’s me too. I’m an actor in my own life-story. And I’m the lead. I can do what I want. Bloody
hell.’
He lit another cigarette from the glowing stump of the last one and stared, amazed, at the ceiling. James Blackwell spoke aloud only once more, and when he did, it was in a voice full of pride
and awe.
‘Fuck
me
.’
And then, in a shattering instant, it came: the ferocious eruption of total war. The country woke, stunned to find that the long stalemate had evaporated in a single night, in
the smoke and fury of an enemy assault so savage, so overwhelming, that all foolish hopes that catastrophe might yet be averted vanished as though they had never been.
Some heard the news from their radios as they tapped spoons on boiled eggs or shook open innocent newspapers that had gone to press a few hours before the convulsion. Others were telephoned by
friends or family. Some were woken by bleary-eyed neighbours, still in dressing-gowns and slippers as they knocked on friends’ doors.