Rose Under Fire (8 page)

This pretty book is all that’s
left of Rose and her poetry. She’s written my name in the front – ‘A present from Maddie Brodatt’. The army nurses she was staying with at Camp Los Angeles found it in her camp bed. I should have sent it to her mother and father, I suppose, but I haven’t got the heart. I remember when I gave it to her, to write Celia’s accident report in.

Oh, Rose,
Rose
. Bloody, bloody hell.

I’ve lost you – lost another friend – ‘as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed’. This war has taken my best friend and my bridesmaid from me in the space of a year. IT ISN’T FAIR.

Oh, Rose – when the US Air Force transport pilot from Camp Los Angeles dropped your notebook off at Operations in Hamble last September, for a long time I still hoped you’d turn up and I could give it back to you. I know it’s possible to crash-land in occupied Europe and make it out alive. I
know.

So I find it
im
possible to ‘close the book’ – to accept that you’re not coming back. And just in case I’m right, I am going to leave your notebook and my letters for you to collect at the American Embassy in Paris. I think you’re as likely to end up there as anywhere, if you’re still alive. Your Uncle Roger is in on my plot and has already filled a safe-deposit box there with a little money for you and a letter from your family. He’s told the Embassy to put you up at the Ritz Paris until other arrangements are made for you. What it’s like to have relatives in high places! Not that it makes much difference to you now.

Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before – words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

If this message ever reaches you – I know you have family in England and plenty of loving friends and family back home in America – but my mother-in-law, Esmé Beaufort-Stuart, says that you have got a home from home with her as well and please to contact her without hesitation. It is a better address to leave than mine – at the moment I am still being sent all over everywhere with work, and I don’t know where I’ll be by the time this ever catches up with you. Esmé’s address, you probably know, is Craig Castle, Castle Craig, Aberdeenshire. That is pretty much also her telephone number, which I don’t actually know – I just ask the operator for Craig Castle when I ring them.

Esmé has always been generous about giving a home to waifs and strays and other exiles. There is a band of tinkers who stop on their riverbank every year for a month – Julie and Jamie were so familiar with them as children that they picked up their strange dialect! And then there are the evacuee lads from Glasgow, whom you’ve met – Esmé has actually adopted two of them now, though the others have gone home. She has also got a dozen wounded airmen convalescing there. For Esmé, I think, the war effort will continue for a while after the war has officially ended.

And, of course, there is me. I am one of her waifs and strays too. She would do anything for me, I think, so on my behalf and by her own invitation, you must consider Craig Castle one of your homes from home. Bring your friends.

That’s given me hope – a vision of you and a lot of other Rose-like people drinking coffee and singing songs from Girl Guide camp, while Esmé plays the piano, in the morning sunlight of the Little Drawing Room at Craig Castle.

Your fellow pilot and loving friend,

PS Fliss and I had to go through your things like we did with Celia’s, and I kept your fuse – I wanted to keep
something
of yours. I don’t suppose you’ll ever want it back, but it seemed a bit horrible to return it to your Aunt Edie.

Oh, Rose – What happened to you?

Handwriting Sample, April 17, 1945

Paris, France

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They told me to stop after I listed the ‘unalienable Rights’. By then I had written enough for them to tell it really was my handwriting, and I was crying so hard I could barely see the page.
Life. Liberty. Happiness.
Unalienable rights.

I can write again. Oh God!
I can write again.
All those months of not being able to write! Of not being
allowed
to write. More than six months of hiding pencil stubs in the hem of my dress, hiding chips of charcoal in my cheek, hiding torn shreds of newsprint in my shoes. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught with any of it. And SO MUCH that I wanted to write. It seems like I have been a prisoner for
so long.

I can write!

It feels dangerous – like stealing a plane. But it is my unalienable Right. And this is my own notebook, which they gave back to me in the American Embassy this morning, along with an enormous pile of cash from Uncle Roger and a temporary passport. The passport is made out in the name of Rose Moyer Justice; date of birth, 22 October 1925; place of issue, Paris; date of issue, 17 April 1945, today. I mean yesterday. And a photograph that Aunt Edie had sent them, a wallet-sized copy of my portrait in ATA uniform from last spring.

I have changed so drastically since then that no one at the Embassy could tell this photograph was really me. That’s why they made me write out the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence – so they could compare it to my handwriting in the rest of this notebook. My handwriting has not changed. My signature matches too. Mother had sent them my Pennsylvania driver’s licence as a sample.

That has convinced even me that I am still Rose – my handwriting has not changed. It is the only physical thing about me that looks exactly the same. I can still write.

In fact it is the only thing I
can
do. I can’t even sleep. The Embassy people checked me in here at the Paris Ritz and left me in this gigantic room Aunt Edie has reserved for me, but I sat on the floor for three hours because I didn’t dare to touch any of the beautiful furniture. Then I got up and spent another hour pacing, checking the Place Vendôme every time a car or truck went by just in case it was Bob Ernst coming back. But now it is nearly three in the morning and nothing is going by any more. My brain won’t let me go to sleep – my internal clock is tensed for the 4 a.m. siren. I tried to get dressed again, but I can’t bear to put those dead women’s clothes back on, not if I have to go naked for the rest of my life. It’s not that cold here. Anyway, I’m used to being cold. And also used to being wide awake when all I want to do is collapse.

What I’m not used to is being by myself.

How could it have happened? I don’t know how it happened. I LOST THEM. Irina and Ró
ż
a, my more-than-sisters – Russian
taran
pilot and Polish Rabbit – I couldn’t have escaped without them, I couldn’t have survived last winter without them, and I have lost them
both.

But I’m kidding myself. I do know how it happened. If I hadn’t been so set on getting to Paris – if I hadn’t rushed off with Bob Ernst in that convoy of American soldiers – if I had double-checked what was going on. We camped overnight with the Swedish Red Cross unit, and I was talking with Bob and that Minnesotan chaplain who was interpreting for the Swedes, and I told them
myself
that Ró
ż
a needed medical treatment. Only it never occurred to me they would leave her with the Red Cross without asking me – without even telling me! Irina was with her and I was in Bob’s jeep, and we set off the next morning near the front of the convoy. I never dreamed Ró
ż
a wasn’t following in one of the trucks with Irina. So stupid of me! Of course the Swedish Red Cross unit was going back to
Sweden.

I’ve lost Ró
ż
a and Irina.

I feel like my world has ended.

But it hasn’t – not even the war has ended yet. It just keeps going relentlessly on and on and on, like a concentration camp roll call when they can’t get the numbers to come out right. And I guess I just go on and on too.

I wonder what has happened to Nick since last August. Oh, Nick! I have dreamed of seeing him again for so long, made up all those stories about him coming to rescue me – but what will he think when he sees what a walking corpse I’ve become? How can I tell him what happened to me, all I’ve seen and had to do?

A lot of it is a blur anyway. I don’t remember the first time I thought I was so hungry I was going to die. I don’t remember when the chilblains started, or whether they were on my hands or feet first. I don’t remember the details of being beaten. I know my sentence was ‘with force’ which means on your bare backside, but I don’t remember them pulling up my dress, not either time. I remember trying to count the blows, but not what it felt like. I have blocked it out.

I remember standing through a roll call in the dark, at the end of a twelve-hour workday when I’d been so behind that I didn’t get to stop to eat, and being so cold it
hurt
, and someone behind me started to cry. And then I started crying too, and in ten seconds the whole block was crying. And they shut us up by threatening us with the dogs, and then they made us stand there for another hour – just those of us who were crying. Everyone else, thousands of them, went to bed, but Block 32 was still standing there trying not to cry while we all slowly froze to death.

But I don’t remember what it felt like to be that cold. Isn’t that crazy? I can’t
imagine
what it felt like. And it couldn’t have been more than a few months ago.

The strange thing is, nothing about the past winter has taken the edge off the memory of my last ATA ferry delivery, the day I took off from Camp Los Angeles in France and landed somewhere near Mannheim in Germany.

I’m going to write it down. I’m wide awake and I’m sick of thinking over and over about the last twenty-four hours’ worth of disaster. Maybe if I think hard about last September, I will be able to forget about today for long enough to let me go to sleep.

Uncle Roger left Camp LA before I did. The RAF pilot arrived in the Spitfire I was supposed to take back to England and we swapped planes; I stood next to the mechanic who telephoned Caen to say I might land there to refuel. I wonder if Caen ever looked for me. Maybe everybody thinks I ran out of fuel over the English Channel.

I remember that flight as if I had the map sitting on my lap with the route outlined in china pencil and a great big ‘X Marks the Spot’ over Épernay. That is where I met the flying bomb. Was it aimed at Paris? Was it one last attempt to destroy Paris? It must have been air-launched, but I don’t know where it was heading. It was too far inland to be aimed at London. I think about this a lot . . . Where that bomb was heading. Other than on a collision course with me, I mean.

I thought it was another plane at first. It looked like another plane. I had a perfectly clear view of it as it came slowly closer and closer, seeming to hover in the same spot just ahead of my wing tip, an unbudging speck in the distant sky like a little black star, or a bug. It didn’t scare me. I assumed it was an Allied plane because I was over Allied territory. So I did exactly what Maddie said she’d done when she saw a flying bomb in the air – I waggled my wings at it. And of course got no response.

I thought,
gee whiz, the pilot must be looking at his map – or blind – or asleep – Or
there isn’t any pilot.

I should have made a steep turn to get out of its way. This is what I dread telling Daddy. That I went after it
on purpose.

I was so sure it was headed for Paris, beautiful Paris. Still intact. And if this bomb hit its target there would be a gigantic crater, broken glass everywhere, dust, summer trees that looked like winter, just like London – I couldn’t stand it.

I pushed the Spitfire’s nose down and went into a screaming downhill dive to gain speed, and the bomb sped straight on about a hundred feet over me. I glanced up and saw it, huge, in silhouette for a fraction of a second, a black cross of wings and fuselage blotting out the sky. Then I thrust on full power and pulled out of the dive in a climbing turn.

Then I was chasing it.

I wasn’t thinking about engine pressure or fuel or anything – I was just hell bent on getting every extra second possible of power and speed out of that Spitfire. And yard by yard, I gained on the bomb.

I must have been going 400 miles an hour. But it didn’t feel fast. It felt like getting your teeth pulled.

‘Come on – come
on
–’

I talked to the plane like it was a racehorse. I couldn’t hear a thing with full power; I couldn’t hear the sound of my own voice.

‘
Come on – nearly there!
’

And then I’d overshot it. Getting the speed right was the hardest thing I have ever done – probably the best flying I have ever done too. I overtook the bomb
four times
before I found that sweet place on the throttle that let me scream along beside it in the air. And then I got my wing under the bomb’s wing on the first try.
I didn’t even touch it.
I saw the bomb wobble in the air and I thrust full power on again to get out of its way. Then I looked back over my shoulder and saw the bomb tip down gently, gently into a spin, just like Celia’s Tempest.