A Man Like Alice
Claire Jordan
Smashwords Edition.
Copyright 2010 Claire Jordan
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ONE
In a single second, the cold reality of what I’d seen engulfed me. The man was going to die. This pilot was about to die in front of me and there was nothing I could do about it.
This was not a mistake. This aircraft was in acute trouble. It was so quick! For the last minutes, the sedate buzz of the light aircraft which happened to be passing over the country lane along which I was driving had hardly entered my consciousness. Now without warning the sound turned into a mounting scream and the plane burst into my vision from over the tops of the trees, twenty feet above the road in front of me.
It was not possible to mistake its distress. With no one beside me to exclaim anything to, I found I had begun to mutter aloud anyway as I tried to keep up with the plane’s bucking and rearing. What was it doing? It crossed and recrossed the winding lane, the twin-engines of the Cessna beginning to choke. There was no one around but me. A single car had passed me in the opposite direction, its horn blaring; we had barely missed each other. I daren’t stop or slow down, I had to stay with the Cessna. It was so low overhead, I could see the mechanics of the underside, the landing gear optimistically down. Perhaps the pilot knew a place to land in an emergency; that had to be it, because the small airport at Biggin Hill was ten or twelve miles away and it would never make it there.
On one side of the road was dense woodland, made jagged by the windswept September of the last weeks which had already dislodged most of the leaves; the branches were starkly bare. At times the plane’s belly was brushing the tops of the trees and I caught sight of the tyres set spinning helplessly. On the other side of the road was a long sweep of fields down into the small valley along which I was driving.
The spluttering grew worse above my head. I saw just in time what was about to happen and braked violently as a large branch came smacking through the foliage and landed with a crunch directly in front of my car. I swerved instinctively and could only thank providence that nothing had been coming the other way. I was sweating now and speeding to keep up; I opened the window, the sounds of the engines’ distress became louder. Crack! Another treetop had been hit and the branch somersaulted down, slicing through the smaller branches beneath it and hitting the tarmac again, this time behind me as I drove. I was panicking now, would I survive this myself? What could I do to help? Who could I call with the mobile phone lying useless next to me? The airport? The police? What could anyone do?
I rounded a bend and caught sight of what it was the pilot must have been heading for, the long sweep of a golf course. “Come on,” I found myself shouting, “please make it. Please make it.”
But there was no time. Suddenly, the spluttering choke of the engines ceased above me and there followed a deafening, sickening silence, as the Cessna could do nothing but bank sharply to the right of me, away from the tall trees, away over the field. The sudden lack of sound unnerved me, as though someone had muted the world. I drove on, eyes glued to the plane, gliding for what seemed like minutes, though it must have been seconds.
And then it became clear to me what was about to happen.
The nose of the plane was dipping frantically, in a desperate attempt to set down before... before the bank of tall, waving trees which bounded the far end of the neatly ploughed field. But the currents of air circulating the valley would not let that happen. The propeller was twenty feet from the tree line, ten feet, eight...
But no...
No loud bang came, no explosion; instead, with only seconds to go before the impact, the pilot was managing to wheel hard left, almost like a handbrake turn in a car, pivoting on one wing, inches above the ground and landing askew with a crunch which crumpled the left wing but which miraculously preserved the body of the aircraft.
I swerved into the puddled verge and jabbed my hazard lights on, leaping out of my car and over the low wooden fence and sprinting as fast as the coarse soil of the field would allow towards the broken plane. There were yells behind me, and I glanced back as I ran to see that two other cars had stopped on the road, their occupants standing on the verge, pointing and waving, one of them shouting into a mobile phone. It seemed to take forever to cross the sludge of the ploughed field, like trying to run on the moon. Out of the corner of my eye as I laboured, I noticed someone else, a man, picking his way across the mud towards the plane away to my right.
The pilot still hadn’t emerged from the wreckage and thin smoke was swirling now from the rear of the machine. Where was he? Had he knocked himself out? I arrived there sometime before the man, and, hearing faint banging, I climbed up immediately onto the broken wing to reach the cockpit. To my immense relief, the pilot appeared to be uninjured, but he was frantically thumping on the thick plastic which muffled his voice so much I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The plastic, now I looked more closely at it, had fractured with the crumpling of the wing; this must have been what was compromising the opening mechanism on the cockpit door.
“What is it?” I yelled at him. “Are you hurt? Can’t you get out? What should I do?”
I had never been near a light aircraft in my life and even on the simple exterior there was a bewildering array of buttons and handles. He began gesturing and pointing at something within the cramped confines of the cockpit but what it was, I couldn’t tell. For lack of any other ideas, I grabbed the reddest handle I could see and yanked hard on it. The man shook his head and gestured with renewed vigour.
“This one then?” I yelled, gripping instead a blue lever. The pilot’s frantic pointing turned into a thumbs up on the other side of the plastic, so I pulled harder. The lever shifted half an inch but no further. The increasingly acrid smoke from the rear of the plane was more insistent now; the wind direction had changed and was blowing it into my eyes, making them smart and water. It was an awful smell, like burnt hair. That couldn’t be good. I pulled and pulled on the handle with a mounting sense of urgency but to no avail, the pilot shouting muffled exhortations and encouragement through the plastic. I wished I was stronger and tried to ward off the terrified, frantic feelings crowding in on me.
“Here, let me help you,” came a low, gruff voice suddenly from below me. The old man. I had forgotten all about the old man who’d been hobbling over to the crash at the same time I had.
“I can’t shift it,” I said to him, making room for him on the broken wing and hauling him up, his bones cracking.
The pilot inside was quiet now, blinking up at us. The blood hammered in my ears. The old man gripped the handle with surprising strength. “Ready? Now pull!”
We both heaved and pulled and pulled and heaved and finally, I felt the handle budge a little, then a bit more, and then turn smoothly through a hundred and eighty degrees. The plastic creaked and splintered further as the cockpit door swung back on its hinges and the pilot inside stood up, coughing loudly and clutching his left thigh which was bleeding.
“We must get clear of the plane,” he choked out. “We have to move now.”
The three of us helped each other down and we hurried away from the wreckage. The smoke was billowing freely now from the rear of the plane and the smell was worsening. After we had put two thirds of the field between ourselves and the aircraft, we finally stopped, each of us panting and sweating. It was a few minutes before any of us could speak. Then the pilot, who was a tall, fair haired man in his forties, turned and offered the old man and I his non-bloodied hand.
“Thank you, thank you so much for helping me. I’m Roger Paignton,” he said to us. “There must have been a leak; I ran out of petrol long before I ever should have done. I can’t... Are... are you all right?” He laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder as he bent double, his hands on his knees.
“Yes, yes,” he insisted, straightening up, “quite all right. It’s this young lady here who really saved the day, you know. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast across a boggy field like this. She followed you all along the valley.”
“She did?” the pilot turned back to me in surprise, not knowing what to say.
Neither did I. “You should get that leg seen to,” I tried at last as something cracked and shifted ominously within the dying plane and we each flinched.
“It’s all right,” Roger Paignton replied, “here come the cavalry now.” He gestured as he spoke to the road a few hundred yards away, where flashing blue lights heralded the arrival of the emergency services. “I just hope they put that fire out before it reaches the fuel tank,” he said quietly, shaking his head at the plane. “I’d better start telling people what happened. You stay here and I’ll get them to come and help you.” He touched us both on the arms and smiled his thanks again, before limping with some difficulty away up to the road and the ambulance which had just arrived.
“I saw you both coming along the valley,” the old man said to me after a short silence. “That’s my house just over there.” He gestured to a red brick building a little further up the valley floor. “It’s hard to believe, it really is...” He straightened himself up again, wincing, and put his hand to his mouth, shaking his head slowly.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Oh, I have,” said the old man, turning to face me. “That’s what’s so amazing about this.”
I blinked at him and shivered slightly. Uniformed men were running now down from the road, carrying bright green boxes and a long black hose. “What’s so amazing?” I asked him, feeling as though I were missing something obvious.
“This happened here sixty years ago. A pilot in the war, the Battle of Britain. He came down here, on this field. They still come with their bloody metal detectors, trying to dig bits of the plane up.” He lowered his voice. “There was a dogfight and he lost control of the Spit and smacked into that line of trees right there, just like this chap nearly did,” he gestured at the wreckage, then turned to face me. “Will Cameron, his name was. It was Will Cameron that died here.”
~~
I am a school teacher. A genteel suburban girl with long, dark, messy hair, slightly crooked lower teeth and the same curiously dirty laugh I’ve had since I was a baby. I don’t like spiders or most creatures with more than double the number of legs I have. I find buying coffee in supermarkets a consistently traumatic experience due to the vast, ever-expanding range. I find it very difficult to diet because of Chinese takeaways and fish and chips and jam doughnuts and sausages with fried onions, though not all at once. I get seasick on pedaloes. I try to hide it when films make me cry. I get broody. As when attempting to board lilos in package holiday swimming pools, sometimes I am on top of things and sometimes they are on top of me. It’s never been easy being me.
But the truth is that I don’t know I’m born.
Sixty years ago, eighty five years ago, thousands upon thousands of men went to fight for what they believed they had to. Often, it was to certain death they marched; certain bloody, bloodcurdling death and before that, misery of the kind most people will never have to endure again. People forget. People think it was so long ago now and look at the state of things in any case, every generation despairs at the state of things, and what was it all for, all the wanton destruction of human life? People say surely the long-dead soldiers would be turning in their graves right now, those of them who have graves, to see the world for which they died brought so low. But whether modern inhabitants of Europe realise it or not, the world as we know it would be a terribly different - and a terrible - place if our antecedents hadn’t stood up for us. However much we denigrate it now, we do live, here in Western Europe, in a free first world and our lives belong to us to do with, to waste or to take joy from, as we choose. And though the mud itself is no longer bright red, the ground we walk on still holds the blood of our relatives, shed for our sakes and each summer, poppies bloom blood red for their sakes; for many soldiers on both sides did not fight for high ideals or for vainglory, but for their homes, their families, their sweethearts.
All of this was turning cartwheels in my head as I fought back tears, fiercely patting my dog Fidget’s head, and rubbing my nose as I sat pouring over my first issue of ‘Squadron Leader’, the monthly newsletter of the Few’s Friends, the Society for the Remembrance of the Battle of Britain. I felt very hot all of a sudden and I didn’t know why. I pulled my cardigan off, squared my shoulders and continued reading. On the page open before me, one veteran pilot was saying: ‘There was nothing particularly brave about what I was doing, I just wanted to stop Hitler crossing the Channel because I didn’t want him to get at my old Mum.’ It made me want to ring my own mother immediately and make sure she wasn’t being threatened by anything in particular this bright autumn Monday afternoon.
“Should I call her?” I asked Fidget, “what do you think?” and Fidget, who can say an awful lot just with his eyes, reminded me gently that my mother would be having her hair done at this particular moment, and that he didn’t think curling tongs or hair spray represented too much of an appreciable threat to her well being. He was right of course. I could get very carried away by things. It’s a character flaw, along with constantly being late despite my best intentions, running out of cash in pubs and having a soft spot for penguins. Seeing my own name in print, under the Welcome to New Members heading on page twelve of ‘Squadron Leader’, gave me a small but undeniable thrill.
It was scarcely two months since Roger Paignton’s Cessna had run out of fuel on a routine flight and crash landed in a field belonging to a man called Thomas Linklater, the same elderly widower who had limped over to help the Cessna pilot out of his beleaguered aircraft with me. Roger Paignton had turned out to be a city stockbroker with more money than sense who likes nothing better than to pilot his little plane all over the south of England on his days off. He clearly had plenty of flying experience, for the handbrake turn he managed somehow to execute just before his aircraft hit that line of trees was little short of a miracle and most certainly saved his life. He had offered both Tom Linklater and myself a flight in one of his other planes anytime we felt like it, but though we politely thanked him, neither Tom nor I had ever flown in a light aircraft before and weren’t exactly encouraged to start doing so now by the events of the afternoon on which we met. I privately felt that flying was dangerous enough in a jumbo jet, let alone in something that weighed little more than I did.
The story of the crash landing had appeared in the local newspaper the following week, a smudgy black and white shot of Roger Paignton, his left thigh prominently bandaged, standing grinning sheepishly in front of ‘one of his other planes.’ Tom Linklater and I were both mentioned by name but we were thankfully not photographed, and I was for some reason pleased also that Tom had failed to tell the reporters anything about Will Cameron and his death on the same spot and in the same manner, sixty years before. That afternoon, it had somehow been our secret, Tom and I, a private, whispered remembrance. He had told me about it and no one else; neither Roger, nor the emergency services, nor the reporters, knew anything about the other young man who’d crashed there.
A few days after the crash, Tom had invited me to tea . My partner Harry with whom I lived did not particularly approve of this turn of events; Harry was a handsome but serious minded solicitors clerk who had a morbid aversion to ‘getting involved’ in other people’s affairs. He wasn’t a coward, exactly; he was just full of the English reserve which dictates that other people’s difficulties are other people’s difficulties and should remain such. I asked him to come with me to Tom’s, but he declined. I was used to Harry’s sense of propriety by now but it still gave me pain when I reflected on how much more we could share if only he thought differently about things; he really was excellent company when he wasn’t being disapproving: gentle, funny and deadly attractive. But there it was. On this dark September afternoon, I was making my way back to the farm alone.
Tom was a rough, gruff old man who had lived all his life in and around the nearby village of Brockholt, taking over the running of his parents’ farm as they had done from their parents, and living there happily with his wife and their own children until they grew up, married and moved away and until his wife’s death some years before. Now it was his nephew who ran the farm and eked out a living for himself, his own family and his uncle Tom, who had been born in Brockholt and was determined to die there. Tom made me tea and brought out half a Battenburg cake in the front room of his ‘granny annexe’, as he called it; his nephew and his family lived now in the main farmhouse. On the afternoon of the crash, Tom had been the only one at home to help.
“It was so much like what happened before, sixty years ago, I mean, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Come outside,” he told me, “and I can show you what I mean.”
Standing by the windswept front door of the smart, red brick house, he explained to me in detail how he had watched the terrible fight over the valley as a boy of eight.
“The German bombers used to head this way, you see, trying to get at the airfield at Biggin Hill along the valley. The bombers always had fighter planes, Messcherschmitts with them, to guard them, you know, and these are the planes which our little Spitfires needed to engage if they were to have a hope of destroying the bombers.”
“So Will Cameron flew a Spitfire?”
“That’s it. We used to get plenty of dogfights along the valley here in those days. The summer of 1940 was the worst, of course. But Will Cameron’s fight with that one-ten, the Messcherschmitt, I mean, it was a real epic. Lasted for ages, swooping and diving, trying to outrun and outwit each other. It’s great fun when you’re a little boy, naturally, but then you don’t quite understand that these are real people’s lives at stake.” He paused meditatively, his eyes darting back and forth as he surveyed the fields before him, replaying the duel in his mind. “Finally, the German’s guns found the main body of the Spitfire, just over there it was, over the village. My friend at school, he had a lump of the undercarriage fly off into his back yard on Swan Street; he paraded it around for months like a trophy.” He shook his head and pursed his lips. “I was watching from here, you see. The whole of the back of the plane seemed to explode and fly off in all directions, in mid air, and it can’t have been much more than seconds before the Spitfire had crossed these fields here,” he gestured, “in a terrible dive. It was going so fast, much faster than when it was flying normally and Spitfires were pretty quick. I suppose I should have been afraid it would hit our house but it didn’t even occur to me that I might have been in danger, it doesn’t when you’re a boy. I was shouting at the plane from where I stood here, and then I began to run towards where it looked to be going down, ‘Bail out!’ I was yelling at it, ‘bail out!’ But it ploughed into this field, the same one that Roger came down in, flames everywhere and smashed into that line of poplars there.”
He shook his head emphatically and closed his eyes. A cold wind blew gently across the field and chilled our skin. “The whole thing exploded on impact. He never stood a chance.”
TWO
And that was my introduction to the Battle of Britain; Tom had made an excellent narrator. His imagination had been caught as a boy by witnessing the valiant fight and eventual death of Will Cameron and he had never forgotten him.
“I did have wild ideas about getting in touch with his family after the war,” he told me sadly, later on that afternoon, “but it was one of those things I never quite managed. Besides, what would I have said? There’s nothing I could have told them they would have been glad to hear. I think he was a Commonwealth pilot. A New Zealander maybe, or Canadian; one of the two. I tell you who might know, though. The Few’s Friends. It’s this organisation which tries to promote awareness of the Battle of Britain. I can give you their information if you like.”
I definitely liked. I carried the little bit of paper on which Tom had written their address down like a trophy to Anna’s house. Anna was my best friend of lifelong standing and most weeks we had a bite to eat and a gin and tonic or two in a local pub together. Well, I say local but the fact is, we often escaped from the more undesirable, leather-jacketed elements of our local suburban pubs for the far calmer, wax-jacketed, pipe-and-slippers brigade which prop up the village pubs around Biggin Hill, the old WW2 airfield. Here we could drink and chatter and giggle in peace. For Anna attracts attention wherever she goes; we are both so used to it now that she by and large ignores the nudges, winks and stares, and I, well, I don’t begrudge them to her. At fifteen, you can imagine, it caused a bit of friction, but now, at the comparatively calm age of twenty-six, I was sensible enough to know that the only thing to be was philosophical about it. Anna was a full four or five inches taller than my five foot seven and was also possessed of roughly four or five times the amount of my drive and ambition too. She had the intellect and good sense to do well wherever she worked, whereas I, well... who knew how far I could have gotten if it weren’t for my manifold character flaws, my instinctive mistrust of change and the fact that, well, that I don’t particularly want to be the next head of MI5? We were the same age, we had the same sense of humour, the same taste in men, books, clothes and we would each have taken bullets for the other, but otherwise we could not have been more different. I loved her.
I had to spend most of the evening at the Brown Bear in a small village near Biggin Hill telling her every detail of Roger’s brush with death the week before and she made all the right sorts of noises, gasps and splutters at the appropriate moments. She was an excellent listener. I was so caught up in the playing and replaying of the story from alternative camera angles that I had almost forgotten the best bit of all. The barman called ‘time’, we drained our glasses and were shaking out our overcoats in the entrance hallway, maligning how cold the nights were quickly becoming when I stopped dead, executing a neat double take, and momentarily becoming rooted to the spot. I had a strange sort of feeling. Quickly, I dissembled and reverted to attempting the buttons on my jacket which I could seldom manage alone. Anna, however, didn’t miss a trick.
“What?” she said to me, “what is it?”
“It’s all right,” I told her, giving up on my buttons altogether and letting her do them for me. “I haven’t gotten around to that bit of the story yet. It’s just that flyer, that’s all. ‘The Few’s Friends.’ The elderly man I had tea with today, he gave me their information, you see. It’s just weird to see it there. I’d never heard of them when I woke up this morning, and now that’s twice in one day. Look.” And I pulled out of my pocket the scrap of paper on which Tom had written down the same address and phone number which ran across the bottom edge of the flyer before us now.
“I’m confused,” she said.
“Come on,” I told her, “I’ll explain in the car.”
The leaves on the overhanging trees all looked the same colour in the yellow street light but they were rustling in a we’re-about-to-fall-off-and-require-sweeping-up-so-you-better-make-the-most-of- us-in-situe kind of way. Anna looked the question at me over the roof of the car as I unlocked my driver’s door; I sat down, let her in and as she arranged her limbs and blew on her cold fingers, I made my announcement.
“The Few’s Friends, the Society for the Remembrance of the Battle of Britain,” I intoned with an attempt at great dignity as the engine refused to start first time and I put the heater on full blast anyway. Anna blinked at me and raised her formidable eyebrows.
“You can barely work the iron, woman! Just listen to your car engine,” I grimaced as the starter motor whirred and clanked and finally caught and sparked into life. “God help the poor bugger who puts you in charge of an air plane.”
“It’s not a re-enactment thing, you fool. At least, I don’t think it is. You write to this address for a copy of their newsletter, you see. Tom told me all about it.” I swung out of the car park onto the deserted high street and headed for home as the stereo began to fizz and crackle in its usual way. I was never sure whether to blame its deficiencies on the weak radio signal or upon an underlying electrical fault within the car itself which I did not like to contemplate. “You see, according to Tom, that field where Mr Big City Hotshot went down last week, it was the scene of another plane crash, sixty years ago, right in the middle of the Battle of Britain.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really. A poor man called Will Cameron engaged a German fighter over the valley there as the enemy bombers headed for Biggin Hill but the German plane, a Messcher-something or other, it won. Will Cameron hit the same line of trees that Roger Paignton just managed to avoid.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I know. Tom was pretty shocked too. He watched the whole thing as a small boy because he lived there, outside Brockholt, even then.”
Anna was quiet for a moment, nodding. “So this organisation,” she said at last. “What are you... do they ...er... do?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but I’m going to find out. You know what I’m like.” Anna did, indeed, know what I was like. I had a sort of running obsession with, well, there are no two or three words for it which exactly fit. With wartime sacrifice, I suppose you could say. I know that millions of people gave their lives for the cause in which they believed and still do and I take nothing away from any of them, but there are specific groups of people who capture my imagination more strongly than others. Even that sounds trite, as if I haven’t a clue what sacrificing one’s life for something actually means, but then no one possibly can until you or someone you love does it themselves and without having that awful decision before you, you can try and understand, and, at the very least, care. I’ve always keenly felt the deaths of the young men who fought and died in the First World War. I read Vera Brittain and never looked back. I suppose maybe it struck me so deeply as soon as I myself was deep enough to be struck by such things, because if I had been born eighty years before in fact I was, then it would have been my own brother, my brother’s friends, and my friends and lovers going off and possibly never returning. There but for the grace of God. Anna knew this as well as I did, and appreciated it, although I’m not sure that anybody I knew felt it as much as me.
“But wasn’t the Battle of Britain fought in 1940 and in a different country to the First World War?” She knew my usual preoccupation.
“Yes, yes, but think about it for a minute. What do you actually know about the war in the summer of 1940? What was the Battle of Britain? Do you know?”
Anna looked at me doubtfully. “I was away from school that day.”
“Right, I think I was too. As far as I know, by the end of May France had fallen and Britain was basically alone in standing up to Hitler, who was chortling at us from the other side of the Channel and rubbing his hands together with glee.”
“Bastard,” said Anna cheerfully, slicing open the silver foil of a chocolate bar. She was always hungry, and despite her three Jack Daniels and cokes in the pub, she had not yet had enough sugar. The only time our friendship ever foundered was when I reflected on how Anna could eat chocolate and nothing but chocolate for days and days and never ever put on weight or get a spot. Unlike me. If you knew me better at this point, you would understand how big a thing this is and how truly remarkable it is we have survived as such friends for so long. She offered me a stick of KitKat, shrugged at my refusal, and muttered “Bastard” again.
“Quite. Then he organised his Luftwaffe to come over and bomb us into submission, ready for his damn blackshirts to take Whitehall.”
“Swines,” interjected my friend, screwing up the KitKat foil. “Can I have a piece of gum?”
“Sure,” I handed the untidy packet to her, thereby uncovering the speedo and realising that in my patriotic fervour, I was doing 63 mph in a 40 mph zone. I took my foot off the accelerator and our warp speed dropped. “And who,” I resumed, getting into the swing of things now, “who was it that stopped the Luftwaffe bombing us to hell, thereby thwarting the Fuhrer?”
“The Few’s Friends, the Society for the Remembrance of the Battle of Britain?”
“Eejit, that was the Battle of Britain. The RAF went up and shot them down and were shot down themselves in the process.” Anna sensibly fought down her urge to utter further witticisms, for she recognised this ardour in me and knew it was useless trying to invoke my sense of humour, which took the sting out of most things, while my blood was up. Privately, she probably thought we had been spending too much time in the Brown Bear under the uplit ceiling displays of rusty propeller parts and threadbare pilots’ goggles; she knew I was susceptible to emotionally-charged topics. Anna understood and I think applauded but did not partake of The Fervour. Fervour had no place in banking, after all. Anna was a sensible woman, far more sensible than me. Most people were. How I ever got to be in charge of twenty-five six year olds is still a mystery to me.
“Mmm,” Anna said, noncommittally. I drove on in silence for a minute or two and set the windscreen wipers going as it began to spit. She was Accounts Manager of a large bank in Tunbridge Wells but you’d never have guessed it out of her power suits. She was, in short, a success. We’d known each other all our lives, same schools and same university, though different degree courses; Anna took something or other very clever in Management and I did airy-fairy English Literature, which qualifies you for everything and nothing. I don’t expect banking was quite where she imagined herself growing up but it’s a good start for her and with the qualifications and experience she has, there will never be a need to stay where she is. I’m extremely proud of her; I collect and keep her business cards with all the fidelity I once devoted, aged ten, to my pop star sticker albums.
“Jule,” she started up as I gripped the steering wheel harder and concentrated on the road. I knew what she was going to say; she saw I wasn’t joking about this Battle of Britain society and she could also foresee the friction it was going to cause me at home. “Jule, do you think Harry will understand it?”
I was silent as the wipers dragged unpleasantly across the screen. Anna knew as well as I would that Harry would not, would never understand. Anna was smart about people.
Me, you see, well, I’m quite a different story. Thing about me is, no ambition. Not professional ambition anyway. What I want to do is have children, lots and lots of children; I’ve been carrying around the hips for it all my life and I see no reason why I shouldn’t squeeze as much out of them as I possibly can. Children, apart from anything else, are the only things you can really leave behind. There seems no point at all to me in rambling on about how everything is going to the dogs and where will we all be in fifty years time and so on; you can’t change anything, and though I belie this good advice every day of my life, I’m still a great believer in the fact that it’s pointless worrying about things you can do nothing about. The only thing that any of us can do is make some good people, who in turn will make good people themselves and so it goes on. Good people are the only things that will ever change anything, and I think we’re going to need quite a few of them.
So, aged twenty-two and without the benefits just yet of a suitable gene pool or the relevant funds, I did the next best thing to starting a family that I could and qualified as a primary school teacher; this I love. I don’t actually think I’m a very good teacher because I’m too soft and subjective. In spite of all my supposed intelligence and common sense (allegations brought solely by my mother in any case), I am still regularly brought to my knees by some devastatingly sweet thing one of the little ones says or does and the temptation to hug them fiercely when they’re upset, or sad, or happy, or just there, is rather too much at times. This is another fact Harry finds unfathomable about me. He was going to just love my new obsession. Thus it was that I remained silent on the topic of Harry and Anna knew now to leave it alone. I loved Harry, I wanted his approval and support, I was unlikely to get it. I pulled up outside her suburban semi, tugged at the hand brake and sighed.
Anna looked at me appraisingly and then asked gently: “Will you have a cup of tea, Jule?”
“It’s all right, I...”
“Simon will be in bed,” she interrupted me, smiling. “It’s quite safe.”
Frankly, neither of us much liked the other’s partner. Anna’s Simon worked as a researcher for a London museum, which you would think might make him a decent and interesting sort of person, but you’d be wrong; it didn’t make him someone worthy of Anna, anyway. He was thirty or thirty-one, I forget which, and this made him ripe for the sort of mid-early-life crisis he seemed to have had a head start on for as long as I’d known him. I suspect he feels that I am a Bad Influence on Anna, one to turn her away from him; well, he doesn’t really have a point. In any case, she’s just as rude about Harry. Each to her own.
But Harry was home, probably in bed, and Simon was apparently snoring gently too. The rain streaked down the windscreen as the wipers stopped mid-wipe. I turned the engine off and returned her smile.
THREE
Harry was indeed ensconced in his half of the duvet and my own as well when I let myself in at nearly quarter to one. I crept into the bedroom and kissed his forehead; he grunted, without opening his eyes, and patted my arm, pulling down the quilt a little for me to get in. I, however, was a woman on a mission. Real women don’t have hot flushes, they have power surges, apparently. Well, I was surging and the Fervour was calling to me. I tugged the quilt back up, changed out of my jeans and large, holey jumper and into my white towelling dressing gown, made a cup of tea, and then sat down to write a cheque and covering letter to the address I had scribbled onto the receipt and stuffed down my bra for safekeeping. Bras work better than bags for small important pieces of paper, in my opinion; the number of times things had fallen out of my huge and bottomless yet still somehow overflowing bag, never to be seen again, was indecent. Bras were the only sensible place to keep a lot of valuable things, as I’ve little doubt both men and women everywhere will agree, although for different reasons.
Most normal people would have simply fallen into bed at this late hour, or at least, if mentally alert in some small way, they would attack the huge pile of Harry’s shirts stockpiling on the ironing board, or turn their minds to next week’s lesson plans for my class. Oh well. Who needs lesson plans, anyway? We muddle along, the children and I. The fact was that the new school year had started without telling me and I was still trying to catch up. Some things I am shamefully shambolic about and others catch my imagination, my heart, and I am there working on them morning, noon and night. You see? The Fervour. Harry was not one to partake of my Fervour, but then I couldn’t really blame him. I don’t expect you get a lot of men with Fervour. Winston Churchill, obviously. Henry VIII. Not really viable romantic options in this day and age, not in suburban middle England anyway.
Dear Sir/Madam (I began, just as Fidget, my small, sturdy dog, appeared from wherever it was he had been with a sheepish look on his face; I told him I wouldn’t ask and he put his head in my lap and sighed.)
Please find enclosed a cheque made payable to you and admit me to membership of your Friends. I am a 26 year old teacher, living just south east of London, and feel very passionately the sacrifice of the young men who gave their lives so that we might live as we do. I am particularly interested in a Commonwealth pilot called Will Cameron who I believe died in his Spitfire over Brockholt in the summer of 1940; I would be most grateful if you could give me any information you might have about him. You have my complete support for your work and its object.
Yours faithfully
Julia Galloway
The fact that I had no idea what the Friends did or what its object was did not dim my fervour in any way. I read this stirring epistle to Fidget who looked impressed. Where Harry sometimes failed to fully understand the obsessions with which I pottered through life, Fidget was always there with a kindly look or a loving snaffle. Had Fidget only had the fingers to turn the pages, I am sure that he would have read A Town Like Alice just as often as Anna and I had. Neville Shute had written a book which netted my fancy at twelve years old and had not since released it: war, courage, fortitude, love, fate and, in Jean Paget, a heroine far stronger and sweeter than there’s been in any fat paperback of recent decades.
And Anna and I wanted a Joe. Each, not to share. Joe Harmon was the book’s hero and a splendid hero he made, too: brave, faithful, gentle, doughty, humorous. Anna and I suffered from (Harry and Simon would say) or delighted in (Anna and I would retort) that peculiarly female disease of always likening our own situations to those of people in books and films. If we could fool ourselves into believing we were Jean Paget, might there not somewhere out there be a Joe Harmon for each of us too? I loved Harry. Harry was real and warm and mine. But I couldn’t deny I loved the idea of Joe Harmon almost as much.
Frowning with the kind of concentration required for most late-night activities, and hooking my hair behind my ears, I sealed, addressed and stamped the letter, experiencing once again the familiar excitement I felt when contemplating a ready-to-be-posted letter from my own hand. I liked to think of the destination of the letter - what the room in which it would be opened would look like, what the weather might be doing outside, what kind of pet might be gnawing at the envelope edges, and what the person opening it might be like; such were the futile imaginings honed over years of pen-pal cultivation. Communication is a great improver.
I didn’t sleep very well, but I didn’t expect to either. Sleep and I have always made odd bedfellows, conducting throughout my life a by turns strange and estranged relationship, constantly undermined by my whirring, clanking brain, which I’m amazed doesn’t keep Harry awake, and by my general excitability. I get monomanias for things. Fidget is someone who understands this and lies next to me when I can’t sleep, often with a paw flung over my hand in silent sympathy. He is only a small dog, a Jack Russell; he came to me via the re-homing centre at a dog’s shelter. Nobody there knew about his upbringing; suffice to say he never liked Harry, although whether this was because of something deep and dark in Fidget’s early life, or because he just didn’t like Harry, I couldn’t say.
No, I considered three nights later as I lay awake again, watching Harry sleep and listening to the darkening autumn rain, I should maybe not be so hard on the poor man. He does after all work very long, thankless hours as a solicitor’s clerk for not very much pay. He is darkly good-looking and usually brightly tender-hearted. Well, except when he thinks I’m being flighty and nonsensical; then he is dismissive, even patronising. He doesn’t mean to be mean; it’s just the way he is. My own idealism is such, however, that, depending on how I am feeling towards him at any one time, I usually have trouble thinking of him as sanguine Bob Cratchit rather than scheming Uriah Heap. God, too much education really can be a bad thing; I mean, Dickens is great but people are themselves - individuals - and no one else and that’s what makes them people. I tell myself again and again that I really must stop comparing everyone and everything to people in books. And I must warn all my little ones against the dangers of too much schooling. See what I mean? I meant that thought as I thought it, and that’s precisely what makes me a bad teacher; I would rather teach them the things I believe they should know in order to be good, decent people, as opposed to the things everybody else thinks they should know. My classes do tend to be a little bit too well versed in the course of the first day of the Battle of the Somme and Elizabeth I’s reign than maybe they should be, considering that they’re only six and seven. Fidget knew all about such things too.
But when, oh when, would I know more about the brave young man who came here from far away to fight and die horribly for this country? When would my first issue of the Few’s Friends newsletter arrive on my doormat? And when, I sighed again, as Fidget echoed my huff, would Joe Harmon? Were there any men, in fact like Joe Harmon out there or should I stop looking upon Neville Shute as a minor deity for creating Joe and begin to resent him for raising my expectations so high and contributing to my insomnia? If this was America, I could have probably sued.
I’d forgotten that the next day was a Sunday and there was no post, which is either an excellent or a terrible thing, depending on whether you’re a cup-is-half-empty or half-full sort of a person; myself, I like the post as you never know what it may bring, but I understand that plenty of people dread it for exactly the same reason. Sundays were also Family Day, alternating Harry’s relatives with my own, and, coming on top of the lack of post, this made every other Sunday even worse. I loved my own family, of course, but I had trouble with Harry’s. I had known him since I was in my early teens and we had always been good friends but we never quite got together until three years previously, upon my return from being taught how to teach. Thus it was that Harry’s mother, Bella, had witnessed me struggling through a variety of different states of dress, undress and drunkenness over the years and even, dare I say, ‘with’ more than one man, which made her view me from under her knitted eyebrows as something of an anathema. I was not and have never been a wild woman, exactly, at least not in reality; I’m far too sensible. And cowardly. But I suppose my formative years were considerably wilder than Bella Lindsay had ever thought possible. She had had three children, all sons, and because they had always kept their private lives just that, she had never really been faced with the shenanigans of a modern female under twenty before.
Now, I hope it comes with age, the ability to resist this vicious circle, I really do, but I find it pretty much impossible not to dislike somebody who dislikes me. Harry’s father John liked to keep out of our way when we visited, emerging from his mysterious study like a cuckoo clock cuckoo stuck on three o’clock each Sunday we were there, firstly to greet us, then to eat lunch with us and finally to wish us farewell.
And so it fell to Bella to entertain us. Like a small child, I had a protective wad of thoughts with which I used to shield myself when the outside world threatened to upset my equilibrium too much. I think in America they call them ‘happy places’. Thinking about Winston Churchill, for example, always filled me with dogged energy, or thoughts of the latest ingenuous words uttered by one of the children at school would awaken my formidable Mothering Instinct, never in too deep a slumber at the best of times. When this instinct was invoked in me, I had the image of myself turning into one of those people who are physically quite frail but in whom extreme circumstances can incite superhuman strength, like a little old lady who can somehow lift a car off her injured husband, (I read about this once so it must be true). But on this Sunday visit, it was with thoughts of the World War Two airmen that I protected myself from Bella’s insidious, invidious gaze. I decided to pretend that I was billeting officer, in charge of finding them homes to put them up while they trained, therefore I had to be extremely nice to Bella Lindsay, because she lived solely with her husband in a four bedroomed house and could therefore put up at least three pilots. This fiction made it considerably easier to dissemble. Walter Mitty may have hit upon something.
I could never decide whether to feel wary of how Harry might turn out one day when I thought about his parents or sympathetic that he had to live with them during his formative years. It worried me that, much as I knew Harry loved me, he was also thoroughly devoted to his mother and father and just which of us would triumph in a high noon showdown for Harry’s affections was by no means clear to me. We had left Bella and John’s elegant ‘Longdean’ and its statue-festooned garden as soon as I could engineer it - playing on Bella’s addiction to the early Sunday evening hymn-singing fest on TV coupled with Harry’s tendency to talk over most television programmes usually did the trick - and Harry was driving us home.
“What are you thinking about?” Harry’s voice came gently out of the darkening upper reaches of the driver’s side as he pulled out into the fast lane. I had always found his voice tremendously attractive, it’s just a bit of a shame the things he said sometimes weren’t. “You’re not worrying about the volcanoes, are you?” Monday morning would bring the full horror of twenty-five six- and seven-year olds each attempting to create a papier-mâché volcano in my classroom: glue paste in knickers... paint in ears... paintbrushes up nostrils... and that’s just me.
“Yes,” I replied with a drummed-up grin, “the volcanoes. Tell me about how to mix the paste again.” This made Harry happy. This was the kind of thing which came under the heading of what he termed ‘looking after’ me. The fact that I was quite capable of reading the instructions on the back of the packet, he deleted from his tidy brain. I rather liked it, actually, being a terribly unreconstructed female.
“Well, before you start, Jule, you have to remember to find the right kind of bucket, and a long stick you can stir the stuff with. Make sure the stick is clean and...”
Harry continued in his well intentioned way and I made the right kind of uh-huhs and ah-hahs; I sometimes thought he had absolutely no idea the kind of things which truly concerned me. He had a species of blanket dismissal, which allowed him to privately reject most of the things about which I expressed concern as trivial and peculiarly female, engendered by an excess of hormones or too much chocolate. But I shouldn’t do him down so much; the fact is that a person who is like Harry might read what I’m saying and pity him, the sensible, practical one, for having to deal with me, the fanciful, hormonal one, every day of his life. Occasionally, if I’m brutally honest, I felt that the silently gnawing anxiousness about the possible futility of our partnership was something that neither one of us should have to deal with. If one couldn’t be sure, what was the point? It was at this stage in my musings that I used to reach the point of getting upset and upon asking myself why, the answer would be blurted back like a small child telling off a sensible adult: but I love him. The thought of not being with him made me quake inside and recoil; how much of this was plain old reactionary me, not wanting change to knock at my door in any way, and how much of this was genuine love for Harry and an indication that we should be together, I honestly didn’t know. For now, it certainly wasn’t going to be me who rocked the boat. Besides, I had a great fondness for Harry’s clean, honest, handsome face and nature: the lesser of so many possible evils.
So, as Harry trundled on about optimum widths of newspaper strips and just how much glue paste to use on the drowsy drive home from Basildon on this particular late September Sunday, I wasn’t thinking about Harry and me at all. I was watching the patterns of the yellowy clouds which splattered the blue-grey sky like they do on so many of the children’s paintings. I was looking up into the heavens and trying to imagine the smoky dogfights which punctuated these skies more than half a century before and how each plane had held not some museum mannequin wearing a sheepskin bomber jacket, goggles and a wonky moustache, but men, real men with large feet and spots, and blue or brown or green or grey eyes, and mothers, and Y-fronts, and terror in their hearts.
“...but like I say, it’s best not to put the newspaper strips into the mixture until you’re actually ready to use them, otherwise they get too soggy and you may even have to start again. Jule? Julia.”
“No, right, yes. With the stick. Thanks, sweetheart.”
~~~
Monday morning, usually a time for either dark depression or bright new resolve, crept around eventually and I was sat at the kitchen table, bouncing my knee (sadly with no one on it), my cheeks full of the last big swig of tea, trying to decide between the flat, sensible shoes or the racier pair with heels which make my legs look longer but pinch my toes, when the door knocker creaked as it was lifted and the postman began to struggle with something too large to go through the slot. I swallowed hard, which dealt at least with the tea, and rushed shoeless to unlock the door. ‘Squadron Leader’. It might be ‘Squadron Leader’. And Will Cameron. I felt illogically excited; a sort of pull, a tide, a current of air, unseen but there.
The lock unChubbed, I swung the door open and our usual middle-aged postman standing behind it. “Morning,” I said cheerily, taking eager delivery of the mail.
“Er, morning,” came the reply as I shut the door on the poor chap and gave a little hiccup of excitement as I leant back against it. For there in my hand was an A4 envelope inscribed with a large red ‘TFF’ in the top right corner. The Few’s Friends. It had to be.
“Julia? Julia, did the form arrive from the bank yet?” Harry’s voice floated down from the bedroom and sounded preoccupied. He was probably trying to tie his tie; I usually had to do it for him. But never mind that; I was tearing at the plastic covering, which was coming off away in half-inch pieces and raising my blood pressure by the second. “Julia?” His voice got louder and the landing floorboards creaked his arrival at the top of the stairs. “Oh God,” he said, looking down at me. “Please tell me you didn’t answer the door like that.”