Tears of Autumn, The (13 page)

‘Really, Biff, after that huge breakfast – you’ll be getting fat.’

She pushed at the metal device attached to the stopper on the Tizer bottle. With a hiss the stopper opened and the fizzing reddish liquid welled up out of the neck. She poured two tumblerfulls and handed him one.

‘Here, quench your thirst.’

He did as he was told as she opened the Oxo tin. Inside, wrapped in greaseproof paper, were the egg sandwiches she’d made that morning.

Rosemary offered them; Biff took one.

Before she could take one herself he’d wolfed it down.

‘That’s good.’

Rosemary tut-tutted. ‘For heaven’s sake, Biff.’

They ate their way steadily through all the sandwiches, jellies and cakes, finishing with coffee and some
petits fours
.

‘I’m stuffed.’

Biff lay flat, legs bent at the knee, arms behind his head, staring straight up into a blue sky with fluffy white clouds racing by, listening to unseen skylarks.

Leisurely, Rosemary packed everything away, leaving only the blanket on which they sat, and turned her attention to the portable gramophone. She selected a favourite record, put it on to the turntable, then cranked the winder until it would go no more. With a click the black wax disc started turning. Rosemary raised the arm, and brought the needle down on the undulating surface. She flopped down beside Biff, her head resting on his arm as the first notes of ‘Smoke Gets in your Eyes’ rose into the air.

She snuggled into him.

‘Hmm, this is heaven on earth.’

He gave her a squeeze and closed his eyes. When the plaintive song ended, Rosemary murmured: ‘In a few weeks it will be the first of October. We should have been meeting Anna and Konrad.’

He nodded. ‘I know, darling.’

A vicious pain was sliding down his neck and arm. It was
pitch-black
.

There seemed to be no glimmer of light anywhere. Where was he? What had happened? He couldn’t remember. The pain was awful, like an iron band around his chest. In a cold sweat Biff lay looking up into the blackness. He wondered about pressing the alarm thing around his neck, but then, mercifully, he lost consciousness again.

As they walked back, there was a deep roar of several aircraft engines. Biff searched the sky but there was nothing to see.

‘Must have been the other side of the hill, they sounded very low down.’

It was the RAF’s big August exercise. He wondered how the squadron was faring.

On their last day they drove through the winding
high-banked
lanes to St Ives, famous for its artists. Barbara Hepworth a sculptor was busy in her workshop, according to a man who was addressing a little group outside the house. Suddenly the door opened and the woman herself invited them inside. Biff grabbed Rosemary’s arm and towed her in as if they were part of the group.

Afterwards he asked had she enjoyed it?

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘but I can’t really say I understood those shapes.’

They went to the harbour and looked at the fishing boats with their bright red and blue hulls lying high and dry on the sand at low tide.

A naval high-speed patrol boat was anchored out in deep water.

On a table outside a little shop they enjoyed scones with cream and jam, and a pot of tea, watching people drift past, some wearing Kiss Me Quick hats, some eating ice creams, and candy floss.

A Salvation Army band came marching along with a little crowd following behind, and children running alongside. They stopped, and an officer got on a box and spoke to the crowd. The band then played one of the Olney hymns: ‘Amazing Grace’. A collection was taken, before they marched off to ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’.

He looked at his watch. ‘We’d better get a move on.’

It marked the end of their holiday.

Next day, on the long journey home, the car boiled up in Bridgwater. After letting it cool Biff refilled the radiator with a kettle of water provided by a woman outside whose house they’d stopped.

She also looked around and found several bottles which she filled with more water for the journey.

It was a good thing she did. They boiled up again outside Taunton, and although he was not a member, a passing AA man on his yellow motorbike and sidecar, helped with water from a large can he was carrying.

Finally, just short of Bristol, Biff had to replace the splitting water hose, which meant walking a mile to the nearest garage as Rosemary read a book. The garage man brought him back in his Ford truck.

It took him another half an hour to replace the hose, fill the system up from a can provided by the garage, and bleed out the
bubbles.

Midnight came and went before the pale yellow of his headlights lit up the cottage. Rosemary was fast asleep. When he gently aroused her she groaned and rubbed her neck.

‘I’m so stiff.’

Biff got the key in the door while the headlights lit up the front of the house.

By the time they got into bed it was two o’clock in the morning.

He had to report to the squadron at seven.

The rest of August passed quickly enough. He was just home, getting ready to go to the tennis club for an evening of ‘friendlies’ and supper when the wireless broadcast the early evening bulletin for 27 August. He could hear it from downstairs. Herr Hitler was demanding Danzig and the Polish corridor.

Biff froze, sagged down on to the bed listening, his trousers around his knees, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He knew that the end was near now: the end of peace.

There was a subdued atmosphere at the club that night, none of the alcohol-fuelled wildness of the partying that had gone on in some quarters of society all summer.

Three days later Poland mobilized.

A white-faced Rosemary turned from what she was doing in the kitchen when he walked in.

‘What’s the word on the squadron?’

He shook his head. ‘We’re in the dark as much as everybody else.’

They had their usual glass of sherry, while in the oven a
steak-and
-kidney pie bubbled and dribbled out of the airhole in the pastry and down the sides of the dish.

‘What do you think is going to happen, Biff?’

He took a deep breath.

‘It’s serious Rose, but who knows? Mr Chamberlain may pull something out of the bag again?’

When they made love that night it was with a quiet intensity.

Afterwards they remained close together, just hanging on to each other, not wanting to be physically parted.

Next day Germany was reporting a Polish attack on one of their radio stations in Gleiwitz.

It seemed so unlikely as to defy reason.

On 1 September German armies crossed into Poland.

Britain and France issued demands that they must be withdrawn.

Two days later Neville Chamberlain addressed the nation, his tired, defeated voice ending with: ‘and consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

It was a Sunday, but Biff drove immediately to the airfield and was told to go away, come in as normal on the Monday. So he returned to a worried Rosemary and did some frenzied digging in the vegetable patch. Later, as was their custom, they went to the tennis club. The courts were closed, the nets taken down and already packed away. The mood in the clubhouse was subdued. There were no displays of patriotism such as their parents had shared a generation before, Passchendaele and the Somme had seen to that. But there was a quiet air of resigned determination that their cause was righteous.

Rosemary turned to him, obviously with something important to say, but finding it difficult.

Anxiously he asked: ‘What is it, darling?’

She swallowed and for the first time he realized that she had tears in her eyes.

‘This means that you and Konrad are enemies now, doesn’t it?’

He shook his head. ‘We’ll never be enemies, Rosemary.’

But sadly, he knew they were – technically.

The Blenheims were first in action, though Biff was not one of their pilots.

Ten aircraft had attacked German warships in the Heligoland Bight, but had failed to achieve any real damage.

Worst of all, the losses were terrible. Half of them failed to return.

They’d all been affected. From his wedding guard of honour Allan ‘Dicky’ Dickinson and three others were not at their places that night.

The war was less than a week old, and already one of the most decent of men, a true Yorkshire man and salt of the earth, was gone. It was difficult to believe that he would never hear his gritty ‘bugger off’, said with a certain twinkle in the eye; never again have the benefit of his earthy wit and wisdom, his pithy comments on Biff’s performance at Rugby.

The morale of the squadron had taken a big knock.

Biff felt a mixture of guilt and frustration. He’d trained all these years, wanted to prove himself, and had felt it keenly when his aircraft had been pronounced unserviceable just as they were to be briefed.

But he was still alive.

Rosemary, when he was allowed off station, flew into his arms as he stepped out of the car. After they’d made love they lay side by side, holding hands. Rosemary let go and found her cigarettes, offered them, but Biff shook his head.

She lit up, then lay back, exhaling smoke, watching it drift up towards the ceiling.

‘God, I needed that. I’m smoking more than ever now, worrying about you, where you are, what you are doing. Every time a Blenheim goes over I get jittery.’

He squeezed her hand.

‘Don’t be. All I’ve done are some anti-shipping patrols.’

He didn’t say anything to her about the enormous fear of imminent attack when he was in the air. When he’d got back from the first patrol his back ached, his neck ached, and he had a headache from straining to see tiny dots falling out of the sun on to him – enemy fighters. It got better as the weeks passed, his fear was still there, but was now confined to somewhere at the back of his mind, though his eyes still ceaselessly roamed the sky for danger.

‘I’ve got a forty-eight. What would you like to do?’

She turned her head, smiled.

‘Stay here and make love, morning, noon and night.’

Biff still remembered that terrible time of a few months ago.

‘Very well, madam, be it on your own head.’

With that he rolled on to her, Rosemary screaming: ‘Watch my ciggy! Biff – Biff!’

The German army took until 4 October to subdue the last remnants of Polish resistance and annex Western Poland, the Russians taking the Eastern half in the unholy alliance that had been the secret Soviet-German Treaty. Everybody in the Air Force, and most civilians too, had noted the firebombing of Warsaw by the Luftwaffe.

On 5 October Adolf Hitler denied he wanted war with Britain. The only action so far had been by U-boats, sinking the liner
Athenia
soon after war was declared. One air-raid had occurred, but everywhere else was all quiet.

The British Expeditionary Force was now well deployed in France, as the happy scenes at the cinema of grinning,
gap-toothed
Tommies in French villages with young girls on their arms demonstrated. The newsreel ended with a stirring commentary to the effect that if Hitler made a move on France, these were the chaps to give him a bloody nose.

Rosemary finished her ice cream and put the tub under the seat. She had been looking forward to the big film, and didn’t want to know anything more about the war for now, thank you very much.

As the opening scenes of
Ninotchka
with Greta Garbo flickered on the screen, she leant against her husband, content and happy for at least another twelve hours.

With the turn of a screw though, the war did become more brutal the following week when a U-boat got into Scapa Flow and sunk the battleship
HMS
Royal Oak
, with 833 sailors drowned.

Life went on as usual, Biff flying his anti-shipping patrols,
Rosemary still working in her estate agents, though it got very slow. She did enrol in the Women’s Voluntary Service, and manned a mobile canteen on half-closing day, taking it to railway and bus stations in the area.

There was excitement in December when three Royal Navy cruisers cornered the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
at the battle of the River Plate, forcing it to take shelter in Montevideo harbour. Four days later the Germans scuttled her.

Everybody hailed the great victory, but Biff and Rosemary did wonder about Konrad. Could he have been on the ship? If so, was he alive and well, though interned, not able to see Anna for probably a couple of years.

If it were true, Rosemary would be envious, worrying as she did every day about Biff. But she would be pleased for Anna.

They were together for Christmas, paying flying visits to both sets of parents, travelling by dirty, heavily overloaded trains.

On the day itself they were on their own, roasting a locally provided goose before settling before a log fire, listening to the King’s speech from the floor, where they were cracking nuts that she had bought before the war, drinking sherry and Watney’s brown ale, and getting through a whole box of chocolates that her mother had given them as a present.

He had already told her that he wouldn’t be with her for New Year’s Eve; the squadron had been ordered to France to join the air component of the BEF and the Advanced Air Striking Force. She had accepted it resignedly. Even without any fighting the war had already taken over their lives. Nothing would ever be the same, she thought, even if it all went away tomorrow. They’d already lost some of the innocence of their youth. Maybe, of course, it was just that they would have changed anyway: they were getting used to being married, after all.

On Christmas night they listened to the wireless, until the wet batteries ran out. Fortunately they had stand-by ones for
the holiday period, under the sink in the kitchen, but he couldn’t be bothered to change them until the morning. It was freezing cold in the bedroom. They flung their clothes off and dived under the covers, holding on, teeth chattering, until the combined heat of their entwined bodies turned the ‘tent’ they were in into a little hothouse. For the first time they lay in union side by side, Biff staying in her until it just naturally withdrew after a long time.

Later, he got into trouble for breaking wind, especially as he forced her to stay under the sheets.

When she eventually surfaced, gasping and flailing her arms, he leapt out and stark naked flew downstairs, and out of the back door to the lavatory, feeling the cold creeping into his bones as he stood there, pulling the chain and running back in again – except that Rosemary had locked the back door.

He banged and shouted:

‘Let me in. Rosemary, let me in – I’m dying of cold. Let me in.’

Her voice came from the other side.

‘Say you’re sorry – and that you will never do that again.’

He held his hands to his rapidly freezing – and shrinking – manhood.

‘I promise. I’ll never do it again.’

He stamped his bare feet.

‘Hurry up, please.’

Rosemary’s voice came through the wood and glass again.

‘You haven’t said sorry.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He pleaded. ‘Rosemary, if you don’t open the door soon I’ll freeze to death. You don’t want that, do you?’

‘Hmm. If you ever do that childish, boys’ boarding house thing again, I will leave you out there. Now, say sorry again.’

‘Sorry – sorry – sorry.’

As soon as he heard the bolt slide back he pushed at the door. With a squeak Rosemary fled up the stairs.

‘Now you behave, Biff. It’s only what you deserved.’

He caught her by the bed, sat down and turned her over his
knee, gave a few hearty slaps to the bouncing bare bottom, before spinning her round and giving her a kiss as she sat on his lap.

‘Now, warm me up, wife.’