Out of the Blue (12 page)

‘Uncle Geoff!’ she called. ‘Charlie’s bicycle – it’s still here.’

Bert has not been able to look at Kitty while she speaks. He listens as she recounts what she saw and stares down into his lap. Then he tells her what he knows and has always
known about the day that the bomb fell on Broughton Farm.

‘The V1 was shot down, Kitty.’

Kitty removes her glasses; her hands are trembling. She blinks away her tears and reaches into her handbag for a tissue.

‘Yes, I heard that rumoured, I think that’s what Uncle Geoff thought had happened.’

Bert lifts his head and watches her and his blue eyes are troubled and enquiring.

‘It was shot down by an American – it was Sammy, Kit. Sammy shot down the flying bomb.’

Kitty gasps and stares at him. Bert’s head wavers as if it is suddenly too heavy for his neck. He leans forward, his elbows stick out, his hands grasp the arm wings and he begins the slow,
painful process of standing.

‘I’m sorry, Kitty. I thought that you must have known and that you had agreed not to see Sammy anymore. But when you said the other day about him having a sweetheart back home and
that you thought that he didn’t really care for you – saying about him coming to his senses and going back to her – I realised then that you didn’t know anything. I saw how
terrible it must have been for you to think that he’d just disappeared without a word. But it wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t forget you, Kitty.’

Bert has risen from his chair and, taking up his stick, he shuffles to the door. Kitty sits as if dazed.

‘Can I make you some tea, Kitty?’

Slowly, Kitty follows him to the kitchen where Bert opens a drawer and takes something from it. It is Kitty who moves to the sink and fills the kettle.

‘I, I knew about it, later on – that the fighter planes brought down the V1s. But no one told me at the time that Sammy . . . that . . . that Sammy . . .’ She begins to cry
again.

‘Well, it wasn’t common knowledge obviously, everything was hushed up.’

Bert gradually, shakily, lowers himself into a chair at the kitchen table. Kitty pulls out a chair and sits opposite him. She blows her nose and sits straighter.

‘Tell me, Bert, please tell me everything – I want to know everything now. Was . . . was Sammy hurt?’

‘No, no, he wasn’t. He was lucky there. Many pilots died shooting down V1 rockets; they got caught in the blast. In those first few weeks after D-Day any pilot would have a go at
them – later on, when we knew more about them, the RAF put Hawker Tempests on to them.’

‘Yes,’ Kitty interrupts him, ‘but what about Sammy? What happened to Sammy?’

‘Well, he’d been coming back in from an escort mission when he spotted it over the Channel and his team leader sent him after it. His brief was to stop it getting to London at all
costs. He was a pilot in wartime doing his duty – but he knew he was close to your house, he tried to bring it down over open land.’

‘Would he have known how many men died at Broughton? Poor Sammy. I don’t know how he could have lived with that.’

‘He knew and he knew about Charlie too . . .’

Bert tries to say something else but his voice falters. He tries again and begins to cough. Kitty stands and gets him a glass of water from the kitchen tap. She returns to the table and sees an
envelope in Bert’s hands.

‘I’m afraid that you might not be able to forgive me, Kitty. I hope you can – but I’ll not blame you if you can’t. I think what we did was wrong now, but at the
time, with you so young and all – we thought it was best for you.’

‘What are you trying to say, Bert? And who is
we?
Whom are you talking about?’ She places the glass of water on the table beside Bert and sits.

‘Me and your Uncle Geoff – it was wrong. What we did was wrong.’

‘Uncle Geoff?’ Kitty feels her heart begin to beat harder. ‘What’s Uncle Geoff got to do with anything?’

‘Sammy gave me a letter for you, Kitty, but your Uncle Geoff wouldn’t give it to you. He said that Sammy would ruin your life and it was best if you didn’t hear from him
anymore. Best to do it then before you got any more involved. He said that you were young and you’d get over it. I tried to reason with him, but he said thousands of girls were being let down
and worse by Yank boyfriends and we’d be doing you a favour.’

Kitty slowly shakes her head as she remembers Gwendolyn and the son she raised alone in England, not in Chicago as her GI boyfriend had promised. But Bert is still speaking and she turns her
attention back to what he is telling her.

‘Geoff said that you weren’t strong and it would be burdening you with nothing but sorrow and, God knows, Kitty, I saw enough of those young pilots die – they left girlfriends,
fiancées, wives – he wanted to protect you from that. Geoff refused to take Sammy’s letter from me. He said you weren’t to have it. He told me to destroy it. I am so sorry,
Kitty. I thought he knew what was best for you.’

Kitty stares at Bert and then at the manila envelope that he holds towards her. It waves in his trembling hand and Kitty sits and frowns at it. She does not understand and, seeing her confusion,
Bert says, ‘It’s for you . . . from Sammy . . . it’s the letter, Kitty, the one he wrote to you. I couldn’t destroy it – it didn’t seem right to do
that.’

Kitty gasps and one hand flies to her mouth, but the other reaches out to Bert and takes hold of the letter. She pulls it to her lap and sees the familiar handwriting before it blurs.

The search for Charlie continued through the day and into the night. Uncle Geoff and Tom Farrell drove round the lanes and out to the nearest villages checking the barns and
outhouses. They came home for meals and looked in whenever they passed by in case he had come home. Meanwhile, Aunt Vi and Kitty stayed at the house and waited in case Charlie returned. As the day
wore on into afternoon and then evening, Aunt Vi became increasingly distressed. She seemed to have lost her capacity to cope, and it was Kitty who spoke reassuringly, made them all dinner and
later, tea, while Aunt Vi paced the rooms, stopping suddenly when she thought of somewhere Charlie might be, or when she was convinced that she had heard him outside.

‘Do you think that we should have left the bicycle where it was?’ Aunt Vi studied Kitty’s face for an answer.

‘It’s not far to walk – he’ll guess that we brought it back,’ Kitty replied.

‘But you know how he is about that machine. I don’t understand why he would leave it.’

‘Please don’t fret, Auntie. Shall I make us some more tea?’

Gradually, anxiously, the long day passed until finally, well after ten o’clock at night, Tom Farrell dropped Uncle Geoff back at the house.

‘I think we should call London and get a message to your mother, Kitty,’ Aunt Vi said when the clock struck eleven.

Uncle Geoff disagreed. ‘You’ll give her the scare of her life. And what can she do from there? Nothing. Anyhow, knowing that boy, he’ll like as not turn up by morning, happy as
Larry.’

‘And what if he doesn’t turn up? What do I say to Win? Oh, we lost him yesterday, but we thought we wouldn’t worry you with it until Geoff decided that he wasn’t coming
back!’ And, as she said this, Aunt Vi snatched a cup from the dresser and moved it to a different hook. In a moment she had snatched up another and soon all the cups were swinging on their
hooks. Neither her niece nor her husband could understand her intention as Aunt Vi continued to swap the cups around until each hung in a new place.

‘I think that perhaps we should telephone Mum in the morning,’ Kitty said gently.

‘Yes, that’s right, Kit, that’s what we’ll do,’ said Aunt Vi, frowning at the dresser, not yet happy with how it looked.

Uncle Geoff and Aunt Vi went to bed and Kitty lay awake in the next room, listening to the murmur of their voices through the wall – Uncle Geoff’s low and constant, Aunt Vi’s
by turns shrill and urgent then muffled, despairing.

Kitty could not sleep. When she closed her eyes she saw the leg in the tree. She pulled out Sammy’s letters from beneath her pillow but she didn’t read them. It didn’t feel
right to her to wander into that state of mind where only she and Sammy existed and nothing else mattered. But the thought of Sammy made her realise that she could not lie in bed and wait for
morning while Charlie was missing. And, thinking what Sammy would do, she got up and dressed quietly in the dark. Holding her breath and avoiding the creaky stair, Kitty went down and let herself
out to look for her brother.

Kitty wheeled Charlie’s bicycle away from the house before climbing on to it and pedalling towards the village. Aunt Vi was right – it was odd that he had left the bicycle behind.
Kitty couldn’t understand why he would do that either. As she pedalled, she thought about Charlie and tried to imagine being him. What would he do? Where would he go? She tried not to think
about what he would have seen at Broughton that morning, but she knew that that would be part of it. Charlie had known those men – he had been proud to know them. The wheels crunched on the
gritty road and Kitty gripped the handlebars and pushed on the pedals and thought about how it would feel to be Charlie.

When, at last, it came to her, it seemed so obvious she couldn’t believe that it had taken her so long to think of it. Charlie was on his way to France – he hadn’t taken his
bicycle because he wasn’t planning on coming back.

Just as she had this revelation, Kitty saw a faint light flickering in the church graveyard. She slowed to a halt and dismounted the bicycle and left it leaning against the wall beside the
lych-gate. Instinctively, she avoided the gravel pathway and stepped silently across the grass towards the dusky figures moving purposefully in the lantern-lit scene ahead of her. She recognised
the tall, lean form of Captain Horton. He was writing on a clipboard while beside him a guardsman held up a lantern.

The glow lit the officer’s face and Kitty saw a man who was just managing to control his emotion. His forehead was furrowed with lines and his lips were rolled inward and pressed together.
He stood on the edge of an enormous grave, several metres square and deep, so that only the heads and shoulders of the gravediggers were visible near Captain Horton’s feet.

Kitty watched as two soldiers approached carrying a stretcher. They lowered a shrouded body into the arms of the soldiers in the grave. Behind them more soldiers approached. Kitty watched on as,
one after another, bodies were lowered into the earth. It was so quiet that she could hear the laboured breathing of the burial party and the Captain’s pencil scratch across the paper as he
recorded the names of the men he would now be leaving in England.

Kitty began to cry and bit against her knuckle to keep quiet. She tried to count the bodies as they were passed downwards but became lost as more than fifty men were lowered into the dark earth.
At last the guardsmen climbed out of the ground and a weary assembly pulled themselves to attention beside the mass grave. Captain Horton read a committal prayer.

It occurred to Kitty that it was dreadful that she was the only ordinary person to witness this secret ceremony. She began to imagine the grief of the countless women and girls involved in the
lives of these dead men. How many sisters, mothers, daughters, sweethearts and wives would soon be hearing that their loved one had been killed? And the thought that these women did not yet know,
that tomorrow they would wake hopeful and ignorant of their loss, began to overwhelm Kitty. She felt a wave of unbearable sadness surge through her; a physical pain as if her ribcage might suddenly
split open and she could not bear it. It was as if she alone bore the burden of grief for three generations of women. And with the grief came a terrifying dread that she too might have cause to
mourn and the knowledge that she was powerless to protect the men she loved. The horror of it engulfed her and she cried out and fell to the ground.

Kitty came back to herself as one of the soldiers, hearing her cry, reached her, and the lantern he carried revealed her kneeling and wretched in the damp grass. More men came to her side and
someone helped her to her feet.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she said through her sobs.

They hushed her and told her that it would be all right, each man repeating a version of a platitude that he felt little conviction for.

‘Come and pray with us – do you feel well enough?’ Captain Horton studied her with serious eyes. Kitty nodded and they walked back to the grave. The servicemen stood to
attention while the officer led them in the Lord’s Prayer and then recited:

Captain Horton led Kitty away as the men slowly took up the spades and began to fill in the grave
.

‘I’ll get Harman to drive you home. What are you doing wandering around at night anyway?’ Before she answered, he called out and the Corporal hurried towards them.

‘I couldn’t sleep, I was looking for my brother,’ Kitty said.

‘Good God – has he not turned up yet?’

‘No, but I think I know now – I think he will want to go to France – to fight. After the . . . after this morning, Charlie will have wanted to go and do his bit – he has
said so before, since D-Day, and before that really.’

‘How old is he? Seventeen?’

‘No, he’s fifteen – he’ll not be sixteen till Christmas.’

The Captain told Harman to bring transport to take Kitty and the bicycle home.

‘Well, I shouldn’t worry too much. If he tries to enlist they’ll send him home to you. I can put word out if you like. Warn the local boards to be on the lookout for
him.’

Kitty thanked him.

‘And remember – you’re not to speak of this?’

‘Yes, but can I ask you one thing? Charlie spoke of someone called Solly – one of your men. Do you know if he – did he . . . ?’