London Pride (49 page)

Afterwards as they were sharing his last cigarette Peggy looked around at the little room as if she was seeing it for the first time, at his books ranged so neatly against the walls, at the gaudy stripes of all those Penguins, blue and white, and orange and white, and the green spines of the history books, at the pale curtains and the striped bedspread and the sunshine shadowing the wall with the long barred pattern of the window frames. How extraordinary that she'd never noticed that before. Nor how green the little garden was beyond the window.

‘Let's go up the Park,' she said.

So they walked in Greenwich Park, arm in arm among sweet chestnut trees heavy with white blossom like carved candles, over grass more green and luscious than she'd ever seen it and speckled all over with a rich pattern of white daisies and glistening buttercups. Below them the colonnades of the Naval Hospital shone white against the blue sky and the Thames was blue too, sky-blue and olive-green, the colours shifting and changing as she watched, and shimmering with sharp points of diamond-white light.

‘Do you remember that day at Brighton?' she said.

‘I was thinking the same thing,' he answered, smiling as he remembered. ‘As a moat defensive to a house.'

‘Will it keep them out?'

‘If the Channel's rough enough, and we have command of the air.'

‘Which is why they were bombing airfields yesterday.'

‘Yes.'

They'll bomb Hornchurch, she thought. Hornchurch and all the other airfields round about. And London. But she didn't say anything because there wasn't any need to put it into words. He knew all that as well as she did. Probably better.

He was lighting two cigarettes, concentrating on the flame of the match.

‘Tabby eyes,' he said, handing hers across to her.

‘Jim?'

‘I've got my props.'

‘I noticed.'

‘We
did
say we'd get married when I was an LAC.'

‘We can't though, can we,' she said, exhaling a long column of smoke. ‘Not now. I couldn't leave London now, could I? Not with air raids coming.' Their surreptitious love-making still filled her with guilt, especially afterwards, but guilt was preferable to running away from her city just when she was most needed there.

He recognized the truth of what she was saying even though it upset him to hear it. ‘No,' he said. ‘I suppose not.' He didn't want her to stay in London. She might be injured when the Germans started bombing. She might get killed. And that thought was so terrible that it made him grit his teeth.

She saw the tell-tale movement of his jaw and understood it. ‘We've got a job to do,' she said sensibly. ‘Both of us. Me in London. You in the RAF.' It was better just to get on with it and not to think about what might happen.

But they both thought about what might happen as they kissed goodbye later that day, standing at the station with his arms round her waist, gazing at one another without words but with a new anguished intensity as if they were trying to print the memory of what they saw
deep deep in their minds. Just in case.

And as the train finally pulled their hands apart, they both said the same thing in the same voice. ‘Take care of yourself.'

He worried about her all the way back to Hornchurch, and dreamed about her all night, but the minute he stepped into the hangars the next morning the war engulfed him to the exclusion of everything else. There had been a raid the previous afternoon and the ground crews were still picking up the pieces. The hangars were full of aircraft under repair. There was no time for the formality of greeting, just a job to be done and as quickly as they could do it.

‘When do they want 'em?' Jim asked as he worked.

‘Yesterday.'

‘Bad show yesterday,' his oppos told him in the laconic shorthand of their RAF slang. ‘Jerry had a field day. Two of our kites pranged.'

‘Whose?'

The casualties were named in the same unemotional style. It was easier to say that someone you knew had ‘bought it' rather than use the awful word ‘killed'. But it was death just the same however you spoke of it.

They worked at speed, stripping down raddled engines, repairing bullet holes, replacing parts wrecked beyond repair, swearing as they got in one another's way. Nobody needed to tell them how urgent it was.

In mid-afternoon their own squadron was scrambled to intercept a wave of incoming raiders, and when the planes returned and the ground crews went out to service, refuel and rearm them, Jim saw for the first time what air battles could do to planes and pilots.

There were three Spitfires in his flight and the first two landed safely, both planes unharmed, both pilots laconic with triumph, but the third returned with its undercarriage shot away and had to make a crash landing. The fire tender and the ambulance raced alongside the runway to keep pace with his descent, but the ground crews could only stand by in anguished impotence and watch as the torn plane dropped on its belly, bounced, skidded, one wing ripping against the runway, crumpling like paper and
hissing sparks, slowed, skewed and finally stopped without bursting into flames and with the ambulance a few feet away from the nose cone. So far, so good, but they all knew they only had a few seconds to get the pilot clear and douse the plane before it became an inferno, and those few seconds were even more anguished than the landing had been. But the fire tender was beside the plane, hosing it with foam, the pilot was being hauled out of the cockpit. They'd made it.

He was very badly injured, his flying jacket wet with blood and his young face seamed with sweat and dirt and completely colourless. As the ambulance crew eased him onto their stretcher and his blood dripped onto the tarmac he opened his eyes, tried to smile and said, ‘I bagged the bugger. Tell the CO.'

The heroism of his return fired the entire squadron. It amazed Jim to realize that he felt an almost paternal protectiveness for ‘his' pilots now. Until the battle began he'd looked on them as men apart, admiring their flying skills, who wouldn't? but irritated by the upper-class ease of those drawling voices, and the arrogance that allowed them to swan through every regulation.

Now, as the German attack continued and more and more sorties were flown, the arrogance became something entirely admirable, a superb, understated courage that played down fear, made light of injuries, dared death. Now nothing was too good for these men or their planes. The ground crews worked unstintingly, by day and night, snatching sleep when they could, aware, tired though they were, that a mistake could cost one of their pilots his life. And the pilots flew more sorties than anyone had ever thought possible. And still the Germans came.

After a week of it, days and nights began to merge into one another. They lost count of time. There was nothing except this daily, exhausting battle in the air. Sometimes they only had thirty-five minutes to service, refuel and rearm the planes before their pilots strode out to take them up again. It was a scramble in every sense of the word.

And a scramble that was watched with admiration and anxiety by everyone in England because so much hinged on the outcome. If the RAF were defeated and the weather
and the tides were right, Hitler would invade. His invasion barges were waiting on the other side of the Channel from Flushing to the Pas de Calais. So the BBC bulletins spread news of the air battles in their phlegmatic British way, and the newspapers reported ‘The Battle of Britain' in admiring detail, and in London, newspaper sellers wrote their placards with perky humour as though they were reporting a cricket match. ‘RAF versus Luftwaffe. Today's losses. Germany 98, England 13.'

And all over South London people watched the skies as the dog-fights roared above them, following the swirling con trails of the embattled planes as they drew paisley patterns in the summer sky, and taking shelter when the bombers were overhead. Sometimes there were as many as four alerts in a day and they heard the crump of a distant explosion and the pounding of anti-aircraft fire all around them and once a Messerschmitt roared out of the sky in flames and exploded in a garden over in Plumstead. But there were no bombs dropped in Peggy's corner of Greenwich and although she was on duty and heard plenty of stories about ‘incidents' elsewhere there were no local incidents for her to attend. Sometimes as the sirens wailed their alarm she wondered how she would behave when she saw her first bomb victim, and sent up a silent prayer that she wouldn't fail. But it was the airfields that were being attacked and the airfields that were being bombed and that made her worry for Jim's safety.

Halfway through the month his squadron was moved back to Catterick, ostensibly for a period of rest, but Catterick was under fire too and they flew almost as many sorties there as they'd done in the south. They returned to Hornchurch after a fortnight almost as fatigued as they'd been when they left the place and there was more work to do than ever.

The day after their return was warm and sunny with a light, southerly breeze, a perfect day for opps, but unfortunately as perfect for the Luftwaffe as it was for the RAF. The klaxons sounded half-way through the afternoon when Jim and his team were half-way through a difficult repair.

‘We'll finish it later,' the Flight Sergeant said. ‘Take cover.'

There was a sandbagged trench alongside the hangar within easy running distance but the raiders were overhead before they reached it. Nine Dorniers loosening out from a V formation, the first on its bombing run fifty feet above the hangars. The gunners let fly with everything they had, but they didn't have much, Bofors, three-inch heavies, machine guns left over from the First World War. Two Hurricanes were in pursuit. They could hear the tracers, and the scream of their engines as they pulled out of a dive.

And then the first bomb exploded on the runway, shaking the ground under their feet and lifting so much earth into the air that for a few seconds they couldn't see anything at all in a darkness of dirt and dust. The second bomb hit a hangar, scattering pieces in all directions. Then there were long minutes of confusion, engines roaring, a plane screaming to earth, gunfire, explosions, the rattle of falling debris, as they crouched behind the sandbags and the attack went on, for ever and for no time at all.

And then the planes were roaring off again and they were scrambling out of the trench, legs shaking, and running to the hangars, moving like automata without any sense of being in control of their movements.

There were about ten craters on the runway, one of the hangars was completely gone, there was debris everywhere, shattered planks and bits of paper and torn pieces of corrugated iron, and over by the mess hut there were several large joints of meat scattered on the ground, wrapped in bits of air force uniform.

Jim was inside the hangar before he realized that what he'd just seen were the remains of a man. Dear God. The remains of a man scattered like joints of meat. Nausea rose into his throat and for a few seconds he stood still, swallowing and trembling. The remains of a man.

This is war, he thought. This is what war means. If they can do this to an air field they could flatten Paradise Row. They could flatten Paradise Row and kill everyone in it. And hard on that thought came resolution. We've got to beat them. No matter what any of us have to endure we've got to stop them.

‘There goes that dratted siren again,' Mrs Geary exclaimed. ‘No peace for the wicked. How am I supposed to clean this cage out if they will keep sounding the sirens all the time?'

The parrot's cage was on her tea table, with its feed and waterbowls emptied and a fresh bag of sand ready beside it, but she was only half-way through scraping the dirt from the bottom of the cage.

‘Better leave it,' Flossie said. ‘Just in case.'

‘Bloody Hitler,' Mrs Geary complained, putting the cage to rights as quickly as she could. ‘Never a minute's peace. I'm sick of it, Flossie, keeping on all the time.'

‘Bloody, bloody, bloody,' the parrot agreed, dancing hopefully from claw to claw.

The siren wailed eerily, up and down, up and down. It was Saturday 7 September and nearly tea-time. The battle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF had been going on for nearly a month now and the two women were so used to hearing the sirens they hardly took any notice of them. It would only be another dog-fight.

‘I suppose we'd better go down to the shelter,' Flossie said. ‘You know what Peggy says.' Peggy was on duty at the wardens' post at the flats but her advice was followed whether she was at home or not.

‘I'll just finish this,' Mrs Geary said easily. ‘We shall hear 'em if they come over.'

‘I think I can hear them already,' Flossie said, and sure
enough the sound of labouring engines was droning into the afternoon air. She put her head out of the open window to see where they were. ‘Oh my dear good God,' she said, her spine stiffening with the terror of what she saw. ‘There's hundreds of them. Come down quick. They're after us.'

The sky was black with German bombers, flying upriver in relentless formation like a flock of iron birds with their fighter planes silver as midges beside them. Flossie was so frightened her throat swelled with terror, stopping her breath.

Mrs Geary caught her fear at once and began to cram the tray back into the cage, her hands clumsy. ‘You will take him?' she said. ‘Flossie?'

‘Oh damn the parrot,' Flossie said, already on her way out of the room. ‘It's us you should be thinking about. Come on! If they start bombing now we shall be blown to bits.'

‘I can't leave Polly,' Mrs Geary said stubbornly, hauling the cage off the table so violently that the bird stumbled from his perch and fell against the wires squawking. ‘Not if we're going to be bombed.'

‘Oh for crying out loud!' Flossie said taking the cage from her in exasperation. ‘Hurry, will you!'