Lost in the Flames (27 page)

‘But you are, Jacob. You are. Because you have my heart. You always have.’

‘Rose, I’m so sorry for the bother I’ve caused you …’

‘Oh, life’s such a bind sometimes, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘What it does to you.’

He nodded, hesistant now, broken.

‘So then, Jacob. Take me. Take me back or lose me.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said at last.

But he knew it was impossible. He would not condemn her to that, to life with him, forever with him. But nor could he stand the thought of life without her, after all he had been through, so he left without resolution. He took the bike up through the gears, tearing at the road, at the wind, into the wrong lane and over the breast of a hill, howling out her name as the lorry hurtled in and he ducked back out of its path at the last moment and his howl was drowned out by the roar of the engines and the lorry’s horn and the hammering about that hurtled through his head, that mad pumping, the pumping of a heart run wild, and back in Surrey Rose felt her heart winding down again, fuel running low, truth filling up her engine now with emptiness, the emptiness of certainty, the certainty of what his answer would be to her foolish ultimatum. And so she decided that she would have to bend, she would have to give in, to accept him on his terms if she could not have him on hers.

But how could he have known that, as he spent the following days out in the woods, overloading Norman’s table with pheasant and rabbit
and hare? He waited, waited for her next letter, but it was delayed, the Royal Mail going down the tubes. So out on the bike again, tired of the gun, tired of the game, out along the Churchill Road and into the fog, then past Kingham and into the wolds, along the wrong lane around the bends and over the hills. And then the other vehicle, not a lorry this time, just a small slow-moving car. But Jacob was really travelling now, he was really going home, and the speed did the job.

Norman took the call.

‘It’s the police,’ he said to Vera. ‘They said I’d better go.’

‘Oh, my God. Who is it? Father?’

‘No, let me see to this, Vera. I’ll be back shortly.’

Then Norman’s slow trawl out into the countryside, going steady, up through the gears as he always did, less happy with machines than with beasts. Then finally the little gathering on the road in front of him, pulling the car over, the policeman’s hand upon his back, gentle, almost a caress.

‘Yes, it’s him,’ said Norman. ‘Let me take him.’

‘You can’t, sir. There’s a protocol.’

‘Let me have him, I said. I don’t want to leave him here in the road.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. He has to stay with us. I’m sorry.’

Norman put Jacob’s personal effects on the kitchen table when he got home and went up to Mill View Cottage to break the news to Alfred and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s head hit the floor again when she heard, the second time Jacob had done that to her with his going.

‘He let his birds out today,’ said Alfred. ‘The ones you gave him, Norman. The pigeons. I thought that was an odd thing for him to do.’

They went round to take a look. The cage door was open.

‘They’re not in the tree either,’ said Alfred, looking up.

‘They won’t be,’ said Norman. ‘They’ve gone for good, haven’t they? They were wild ones, those. Were never meant to be in a cage anyway, I suppose.’

Vera phoned Rose with the news and that evening she drove up to Chipping Norton, leaving Ralph and the little one on a pretence. She sat with Norman and Vera, perched on kitchen chairs, silent for a while.

‘This was in his pocket,’ Norman said at last, passing Rose the letter. She unfolded it, saw the gothic handwriting, read it through as
Norman watched her.

Dear Tommy Bomber

Let me explain to you how it was, what you did in July 1943, how you took my life away. Four times you came to drop your gifts. Or was it five? I lost count in the end, lost count of the days, of the bodies. Of the limbs, the ones I saw and the ones I removed. The people I buried, the bits of them. The first night was bad enough, but when you came back again, I forget now, the second time or the third, which was it now, the firestorm? You can probably tell me, Tommy, you had the best view, up there, looking down, twenty thousand feet or so. A panoramic view, I would suggest, no? Beautiful perhaps, all that orange light, silent down beneath you. You could feel the heat in your belly through the skin of the plane? I heard that was so from captured airmen, the ones I was meant to save. Imagine that, Tommy, heat rising twenty thousand feet into you? How must it have felt to be in there, to be in the cellars just ten feet underground? Did you think of us then, down below, in the fire? It was hot Tommy, the weather I intend to mean, hot and humid already before you came, perfect weather for a tinderbox. And when you came back again the hot humid weather was still hanging over the city and a strong wind was blowing, fanning the flames that remained from your previous raids. Seven hundred bombers over our little city, though it seemed like more, swarms of you, in little more than an hour, swamping the defences with how many tonnes of bombs? Two thousand? Three maybe? The fire service was already dispersed and stood no chance against the volume, the intensity of the bombing, the time-delay fuses. And the cookies, those big ones? How quaint of you, that name. And the incendiaries, always the incendiaries spreading fire. Innumerable fires took hold, the roofless buildings acted like chimneys, you see. The wind created updraughts, strong updraughts that sent the flames so high into the air I thought they must burn you too and bring you down to join us. The flames leapt across buildings, onto those that were undamaged by bombs and set those ablaze too, and as the conflagration grew, fire sucked oxygen in on itself, drawing air in from the suburbs in a great howling gale and the firestorm took hold and within half an hour four square miles were a boiling mass of flame and within an hour my poor city had been consumed. In the cellars and the air-raid shelters my people cowered beneath the blasts that shook the walls of their underground hell and the firestorm above sucked the oxygen from the 
cellars and raised the temperature to roasting point, and thousands sat and asphyxiated or baked below ground. Those that could, hurried up cellar stairs and out into the street, but they were met there by the roar of a hellish organ, the booming resonant howl of the firestorm, beating out rhythms like the clashing of metallic drums as it whipped up hurricane winds and tornados of flame tore down the streets and across the squares and parks, ripping up trees and flinging burning human bodies high in the air and across the tops of the houses where the roofs had been. Eyes were liquefied by the heat, Tommy, jelly-like tears running down cheeks in streams, the windows in the cars and the trams began to melt and run and the fuel in bus engines exploded and bags of sugar and jars of jam and honey in grocery stores boiled and then burst – I saw all this myself – and the asphalt on the streets began to soften and then bubble beneath the feet of the fleeing people and their feet sank into the melting street and became stuck and the people collapsed into the surface of the road as their bodies lit up orange and red and blue. I saw that too. And those that made it to the water of the ponds in the park and the port docks and threw themselves in to douse the burning found that the phosphorous that burned their skin could not be extinguished by water. Tricky of you, Tommy, it continued to burn as they tried to wipe it away, smearing it across themselves, and it ate at their flesh as your flames ate their way across my city. The firestorm held this intensity for three hours and in the morning the streets were strewn with charred corpses, thousands of them, still licked by pale blue tongues of flame, those of adults shrunk to the size of infants and those of infants shrunk to very little at all. And of course many bodies simply disappeared, burnt completely away. And my wife and my son and my parents were among them, the disappeared, the house gone, all possessions gone too, no clothes, no photos, no keepsakes. Nothing at all to remember them by. Not even the street could be found, it was just rubble, everywhere rubble. I could not even find the place where we had lived, where they had died. This was your work, Tommy Bomber. Congratulations, you did it well.

And so, Tommy Bomber, what has your life been worth, what was it for? What good has come of it? No good for you now, surely, and no good for me. So remember me, Tommy, remember me please. When you look in the mirror, at that face of yours, remember me. Remember what you did – to me, to my people, to yourself – and consider for a moment
the memory the world will have of you
.

‘He told me about that bloody letter,’ said Rose. ‘Used to read it every day, he said, poor lad. I never want to see the thing again.’

‘Me neither,’ said Norman.

He stood up and put the thing in the stove, and the fire burned it away to nothing.

Rose had always hated the smoke of cigarettes indoors, unless of course it was filtered into the room through Jacob’s lungs, the lungs that nudged against his heart as he inflated them, making the smoke acceptable, something to be wished for then and longed for now, an impossibility. From any other source it was an irritation, an efficient means of stinking up the soft furnishings, and it still reminded her horribly of Ralph and the scattered ash he had always left in the wake of those dark hidden thoughts, thoughts about those days, the ones they almost had in common, a partial overlapping of experience, days and years from another lifetime lived by other people, lost young and hopeful versions of themselves. And even now the distaste was strong enough to force Rose into the garden before the thing could be lit.

It took her an age of careful descent to negotiate the two flights of stairs, a packet of Silk Cut in one hand, the other gripping the banister that the social services had installed the previous summer. She left the door on the latch and stood in the porch and struck a match. The cigarette sparked up as she stoked its fire with her inhalation. A glowing orange shape ascended a couple of miles away across the Cotswolds, slipping up into the night sky, then another, borne swiftly away on the New Year wind in the blue-white light of a bomber’s moon. Rose fetched her binoculars from the front room and peered through the sights at the glowing orange lights, further away to the west now, passing high over Elm Tree Farm, their burning image shuddering upon the lens as her hands shook with age and weakness and cold. She saw the surging flames and the suggestion of dark shapes against the black-blue of the sky – hot-air balloons, bearing their occupants into the night, champagne no doubt chilling their lips as they looked down on the dim lights of the villages in these first minutes of a new year.

Rose extinguished her cigarette in the pot by the door, a midden of
stubs that had failed to hasten her end. She crept back up the stairs, sat at the desk in her study, tugged back the curtain, peered across the street towards the cottage where she had first set eyes on Jacob. A light had come on in the window beneath the apex of the roof at the gable end. She peered through the binoculars and into the room behind the glass – Jacob’s room, it would always be his, his childhood room, the one in which she had first seen him when she had not long since started school, the room where Jacob and Vera and William had slept before the war. They were all gone now but their ghosts hung about the place, unwilling to leave her be.

Near her desk, next to the books she had written in the decades before her eyesight began to fail, Rose kept a well-thumbed volume listing the few known facts about the nature of the incident that had initiated her demise, her long slow implosion, a steady erosion of sunlight and air, the things that had made her before fire ate her away and she filled up with smoke. ‘My heart is my engine,’ she had told Jacob when they were young. But her heart had combusted and burnt itself as black as a burnt-out seam of coal, starved of the oxygen his existence had given her. And the slim volume told the story, as much as was known, about what had set the fire burning, what turned her heart to coal. It was a simple black book, 224 pages of small black font, a black cover unadorned by unnecessary art or illustration, just a matter-of-fact title and a large Royal Air Force badge.
Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War, 1945
, one of a series of six volumes, 12,000 lost aircraft and 55,573 lost lives – 55,574 if she counted her own. She kept the books on a set of oak shelves, the ones Jacob had in his room when he was a boy obsessed with planes and the desire to be a pilot one day. She took the volume of losses for 1945 and turned to one of several pages concerning the night he had come down – a long list of Lancaster squadrons and serial numbers, their targets, take-off times, and whatever details were available regarding the nature of their destruction. She looked at the names of one doomed crew in particular, seven young men, small black crosses denoting the ones who had died.

The Bomber Command Memorial had finally received planning permission in the spring of 2010 and the necessary funds had since
been raised for its completion at a site on the edge of Green Park.

The memorial had been a long time in coming and was opposed each step of the way. In 1992, the fiftieth anniversary of the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, a statue of Bomber Harris was unveiled by the Queen Mother outside the RAF church on the Strand. Rose and Vera stood among the crowd and they watched as the silk fell off the great bronze statue and Harris stood there with his chest stuck out as a Lancaster flew overhead, its engines drowning out the howls of the Peace Pledge Union and the others who had come to boo and jeer, the Queen Mother visibly startled at the catcalls and the shouts of ‘Murderer’ and ‘Butcher’. The crowd eventually dispersed and when the sun rose the next day the statue had been daubed with blood-red paint. Rose and Vera had travelled back up to Chipping Norton that day on the train and Vera went to the care home where Norman spent his days now in a chair by the window, quiet as a lamb, a leg and an arm crippled by a series of strokes, and she spoke to him softly, telling him about her day in London, and he nodded occasionally and then looked at her in confusion, but with something like recognition in his eyes, and said what he had often said to her in recent months.

‘I used to fly in planes, you know. I used to fly in planes with Jacob.’

‘Yes, dear,’ Vera said, shaking her head at the nurses in case they had overheard. ‘Yes, dear, I know you did.’

‘And the dog used to navigate. The dog used to bring the sheep home. Beautiful dog she was, Beauty they called her, Beauty, you know.’

‘I know, dear,’ Vera said again, and she patted the big strong hands that he clasped together in his lap, and she thought again of the sparrow-brown gloves she had knitted him all those years before, and her eyes remained dry but she was crying inside.

A year later both were gone, Norman buried next to Vera in the churchyard down the road, returned to the soil from which he had come, on which he had built his life since the day John Bainbridge first strapped him to an Edwardian plough in a brown-clod northern field.

And so, in 2012, Rose made the journey to London alone this time,
taking a cab all the way from her door-step to the capital, the kind of extravagance for which she now had the money but insufficient time left in which to spend it. The cab left her at the door of the place by the river where she had stayed with Jacob on an occasion when their leave had coincided and they had spent a night among the city lights, not the streetlights and the headlamps of hurtling cars that she looked out on now, but the searchlights that had waved above the Docklands as the Heinkels roared overhead and the bombs fell away in the distance and Jacob held her in his arms, held her tight to him and whispered words of love in her ear that drowned out the noise of the bombs not with their volume but with the immensity of their meaning, words that could wipe away all the bad in the world, wrapping her in a cocoon of love that no bombs could penetrate, nor years of absence erode.

She woke early the next morning and had the receptionist call her a taxi. She murmured vague replies to the driver as he went on and on about Nicolas Sarkozy and the European Union, something he had seen in the paper that morning, and she knew that he took her murmurings as a sign of senility rather than a total lack of interest in what he was saying.

Rose paid him and struggled out onto the pavement beside the Bomber Command Memorial. The great blocks of Portland stone stood pale in the watery morning light, marked with chiselled scars, words of stone in eulogy to the squadrons of men who had given their lives. In the centre of the memorial, among the Doric columns, stood a bronze statue of the seven men of a Lancaster crew, the air around them lit by the searchlight beam of a spotlight embedded in stone at their feet. A respectful crowd gathered around the monument and then high overhead flew the last Lancaster bomber in England, releasing a torrent of poppies into the blue summer sky, and the plane’s engines would have wiped out the noise of any protesters who stood out of sight, booing and hissing and calling out ‘Murderers’ and ‘Butchers’ and ‘Remember Dresden’, and the group of Bomber Command veterans who were seated at the front did indeed remember Dresden – and Hamburg and Essen, Berlin and Dortmund, and all the bloody others – and as they walked away at the end of the day they passed by the place where a column of smoke had earlier been, past a small group of men who had set a Union flag burning while chanting their condemnation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That night Rose dreamed that she returned to the memorial at dawn, approaching it through a mist so thick that she did not see until the last few yards the vulgarity of the words that had been sprayed upon it overnight and the blood-red paint that was splattered across the bronze of the seven-man crew. She gently reached out and felt the paint still wet beneath her fingertips, and she took a handkerchief from her pocket and stretched as if to wipe the paint from the young men’s eyes, but they were out of reach, high above her now, so she wiped the red mess from their boots instead. When she looked up there was an old man standing at her shoulder, dressed in a dark blue blazer and a beret, a medal upon his chest. Rose saw in his red-rimmed rheumy eyes the moist suggestion of memories or tears as he gazed at the crew, and then the man shook his head, turned his back on the crew, walked into the mist and was gone.

The dream dissuaded Rose from returning to the memorial the following day as she had planned, lest the fears she had dreamed be proved true. Instead she took a taxi home to Chipping Norton and in her study she took out the school exercise book that Elizabeth Arbuckle had given her as a keepsake after Jacob had been reported missing, the book in which Jacob had written as a schoolboy his stories of the future and how he would be a pilot one day. She flicked through the pages and read the fading words, admired the flowing neatness of the writing and the almost turquoise ink and the careful consideration of the phrasing for one so young. She stopped at an entry dated 1937, when Jacob was fourteen, still only a child but already just a few short years before he died. The question the teacher had set was written at the top of the page, ‘What are your ambitions for the future?’ and Jacob’s answer was written neatly underneath. Rose mouthed the words silently as she read, remaking his words as they departed her mouth:

‘My ambition is to live a good life. By this I mean an exciting life and a worthwhile one. For some people, this would mean being a doctor or a teacher or a priest – but I can’t imagine myself as a priest, even though I want to live a good life and be a good person and do good things. Because I can’t really be a priest if I don’t believe in God, even though I know that I have to spell His name with a capital letter out of respect or similar feelings. My father does not believe in God – he says that he is my father and I do not need another one to look after me in the sky – and I believe what my father tells me, because I am a
good son, and so I don’t believe in God. But I do think it would be useful to have somebody in the sky who will look after me in the future, because my ambition is to be a pilot and to have adventures in airplanes and to fly around the world. Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but I shall probably manage it if I set my mind to it and try my best. And when I have seen the world, I will return to Chipping Norton and I will meet my ‘one true love’ (I have read about people like this in books, but I don’t think I’ve met one yet) and we will live in a house with a fishpond and a vegetable patch and we will have some children – I don’t know exactly how many yet, but I suspect quite a few – and we’ll all be quite happy together.’

Rose closed the exercise book and lit herself a cigarette. She was too tired now to bother about going downstairs and into the garden and instead she opened the window, drawing in the smoke as she did so. Then she opened the drawer of her desk and took out the last piece of him she had left, the fuel that had fed his lungs with the strength to carry on through all those years in the war. The silver cigarette case had dulled with age, engraved with his name and etched by life’s thousand tiny scars. She opened it and gently removed the cigarette, brown and dry, a dead little chrysalis in the palm of her hand, and she saw again the face of the broken man – the fire-starter – who had lit the thing and desperately sucked it down to a stub more than half a century before, and she wondered once more about the butterfly that might have emerged.

Then she snapped the lid shut on the stub-end of her memories and she took the other thing from the drawer, the page on which Jacob had written to her late on in the war, a man then, hanging on to the edge of the cliff of death. She unfolded the fading page, the edges dissolving with the years, the cracks along the folds letting light back in from beyond, from the time when Jacob had written down his feelings and given them to her in a poem. She read it again silently now.