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Authors: Eliza Graham

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BOOK: The One I Was
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‘What do Germans look like?’ He forced himself to make the question sound casual. Perspiration ran down the back of his neck.

‘In the news films they’re always very blond.’ She scratched her chin. ‘Blue eyes.’

‘Not like me, then.’

‘No.’ She laughed. ‘Just as well. If they thought you were a proper Nazi they’d put you in a camp, wouldn’t they? Or send you to Canada or Australia on a boat. But you’re Jewish anyway, all you Fairfleet boys, aren’t you? My aunt told me about you. So you’re probably all right.’

He thought of Ernst and Richard. They’d been threatened with an internment camp purely on the grounds that they were from Germany and of fighting age. Lord Dorner had protested. Loudly and effectively. The boys had read about the
Arandora Star
, how the prisoners had drowned in the holds when the ship was torpedoed. And even if you weren’t sunk you were stuck in a hold for weeks or months with sadistic guards who urinated in your food and stole your possessions. Ernst had heard the rumours and asked Dr Dawes if they were true. Dr Dawes hadn’t been able to deny it, while assuring the boys that none of them would be deported.

They were under the trees now. Good. His emotions wouldn’t be so readable. Insects buzzed around them. Benny blinked to make sense of the darkness.

She stopped. ‘You’re not bad-looking.’

Wasn’t he? He had no idea how his looks compared with those of other boys his age.

‘My boyfriend in London was all right. But I like you too.’ She came closer. Her breath smelled milky. A band of freckles spread over her nose, as though someone had flicked a paintbrush loaded with gold paint against her face. Her hair was so light a blond it was almost white. ‘Want to kiss me?’

‘All right.’ Her mouth seemed suddenly to gain a life independent of its owner, fixing itself on his. The lips themselves felt nice: warm, soft. She pushed his mouth open and then her tongue was inside his mouth. He couldn’t help springing back a little, as though she’d stung him.

‘Don’t you like it?’ A hint of mockery in her eyes.

He put a hand to his neck. ‘Insect bite. Sorry.’ Vital to regain his dignity. He took her into his arms. She hadn’t seemed curvy on top, but her little breasts jutted into his chest, like a pair of small warm animals.

‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘You’re nice and tall, aren’t you? I like tall ones. Want me to put my hand down your shorts? Or you can stick yours up my shirt, if you want.’ She wriggled against him. He wanted to run. He wanted to stay. He didn’t know what he wanted.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Mona.’

‘I’m Benny.’ He stroked her face. ‘You’re pretty. I’m late.’

Late for nothing in particular.

‘Meet me again?’

He smiled. The smile seemed to satisfy her because she took his hand as they walked back through the woods.

‘Knew it wouldn’t take me long to get another boyfriend.’ Her voice hummed with satisfaction.

Benny thought of Rainer and felt guilty. For about a second.

*

‘Fairfleet was so quiet during the war years, Rosamond,’ Benny told me. ‘Not only was it impossible to imagine there was a war on; often it was almost impossible to think that there was anything at all happening anywhere on the planet.’

I knew that feeling, recalled it from childhood summers spent at Fairfleet: that dreamlike sense that we might be the last people left alive.

‘I came back from the village and wondered what on earth I was going to do with myself,’ he went on. ‘The last thing I expected was that the day would turn out the way it did.’

12

He was sitting on the stairs in Fairfleet, enjoying the cool quietness and reliving the encounter with Mona, when Lord Dorner came inside. They’d hardly seen him in the last eighteen months. Usually he stayed in a hotel in London, returning for occasional weekends if his wife was at home. Now there were so many planes piling out of the factories that Harriet Dorner was busier than ever; no more rubbish about women not flying
serious
planes. They’d even seen her photograph in the
Express
, standing beside a Spitfire. ‘Society Hostess Does Bit for RAF’, the caption read. Probably just a staged photo for propaganda, as it seemed unlikely they’d let women fly fighters, David said.

Benny stood up.

‘Ah.’ Lord Dorner looked worried. Probably trying to remember which one Benny was. The one who’d made a fuss about keeping kosher when he’d first arrived? One of the boys the police had wanted to inter on the Isle of Man? Or one of the more nondescripts? ‘How are those poor ill boys doing?’ Lord Dorner asked.

‘David’s a bit better, but they’re worried about Rainer.’

‘Poor chap.’ A pause. ‘And what about you … Benny? Finding things a bit dull, eh?’

‘Not really.’ He remembered his manners. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Fancy a drive?’

‘In the Daimler? He hoped he didn’t sound like an overexcited kid. He’d never so much as sat in the shiny black car before. Since the early months of the war it had lived in one of the stables.

‘It appears I am being encouraged to use it for … a particular bit of business. They’ve even given me petrol.’ Lord Dorner looked excited himself. ‘I’ve got a meeting in a factory in Slough. Meanwhile Harriet’s touching down at an airfield between here and there.’

Probably White Waltham, near Maidenhead. The boys knew where most of the air fields in the south were located. David stuck red pins onto a little map on the bedroom wall.

‘I was going to say hello. She’s delivering a Spitfire.’

‘A Spit!’

‘If the weather holds. So far as I know, conditions have been good across the whole country, so she should be landing in a couple of hours.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’m leaving in ten minutes. Ask Dawes if you can come with me. You’ll have to stay in the car while I’m in the factory later on, security, I’m afraid. So bring a coat and something to read. And ask Alice Smith to make you some sandwiches.’

Benny decided to let the last suggestion slip from his mind. It wasn’t worth risking more of Alice’s frosty tone.

Half an hour later he sat beside him in the leather-scented Daimler, trying to look as though this kind of thing happened to him all the time. Benny had never spent more than an occasional hour with Lord Dorner and had certainly never been alone with him for more than five minutes at a time. He’d half expected Lord Dorner to have a driver.

‘Bit of a treat for me to drive myself for a change,’ he said, seemingly reading Benny’s thoughts. ‘My regular driver’s off sick and they haven’t replaced her yet. We don’t often take out this beauty because of the petrol ration. But the ministry think it’s worth it for this particular occasion.’

Sometimes Lord Dorner accompanied foreign visitors to factories, Benny’d heard, trying to persuade them to lend Britain money to build more weapons. Perhaps they’d be meeting Americans after they’d visited White Waltham, if that was where they were going.

The road wound slightly. The sun hit Benny’s eyes.

‘Pull down the visor,’ Lord Dorner said, noticing.

There was a little leather tab you could pull up inside the visor, revealing a mirror. Presumably so that women could check their make-up. Benny regarded his reflection. He thought he could see his father in his features. He’d never noticed the resemblance before. The shock made him close the mirror and push up the visor. Had his father been handsome? Could he, Benny, really be so, too?

This had been a day of new experiences, and yet it had started mundanely enough, with Alice Smith placing his brown toast on a plate in front of him with her usual little sigh.

But he wasn’t going to think about Alice Smith now. It was months since Benny had travelled anywhere further than the village. Winding roads skirted the northern side of the Berkshire Downs. In the fields below in the vale, they were raking hay. The sky was clear, pale blue.

‘Perfect for Harriet’s landing.’ Lord Dorner glanced at his watch. ‘She couldn’t tell me exactly when she’d be touching down, but we should have timed it fairly well.’

Benny wanted to ask where she was flying in from, but had learned not to ask questions. So much had to be secret these days.

‘Are you happy in England, Benny?’

The personal question made him straighten in the leather seat. How to answer? During the day the business of lessons, playing football, anticipating mealtimes and saving up for cinema trips swallowed him up, allowing no time for too much brooding. Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, there’d be a slight pang, a memory of that kitchen drawer back in Germany that he’d open to find a bar of chocolate, bought just for him. There’d be a memory of his mother, laughing in a new hat, telling him that yes, he could have another ice cream, even though he’d probably
burst
.

‘Yes sir,’ he answered Lord Dorner.

‘I was a refugee myself, you know. Came over from Russia with my family as a baby.’

He looked at Lord Dorner in his well-cut suit, a pre-war purchase, still in good condition.

‘My father was a silversmith. My mother took in washing. I grew up in Whitechapel and some say you can still hear it in my accent. When I stay up in the hotel in London, some of the admirals’ wives and the lords from the shires murmur about Jews over their sherry. Not always out of my hearing.’

Benny couldn’t speak.

‘Things are changing, though, Benny. Society is more accepting of outsiders.’ They were silent for a few minutes. The Downs dropped away. To the north the Chiltern Hills still sat green and blue, slightly hazy now. Lord Dorner turned off the road. ‘We’re going down here.’

Ahead of them Benny spotted hangars and a watchtower. If you lived around here, what sights you’d see. Sometimes living at Fairfleet was like being sealed in a beautiful bubble.

‘Two planes stalled and crashed into bungalows near here only last year,’ Lord Dorner said, just as Benny was thinking this. ‘It can be dangerous living close to an aerodrome.’

Up in the sky a single plane circled, sun sparkling on its wings.

‘That’ll be my Harriet,’ Lord Dorner said. ‘In a Spitfire.’ You could hear the pride in his voice. ‘She’s waited so long for this chance, Benny.’ He slowed for the guards at the gates. When they stopped, he unwound the window and pulled something out of an inside pocket, ID or authorization or something, but the guard waved him on without looking at
whatever it was, barely glancing at Benny. Perhaps they thought he was Lord Dorner’s son. Which would also have made him Harriet Dorner’s son. He wriggled on the leather seat at the thought.

Benny didn’t need to have the plane identified. Every schoolboy in the country would have known the gravelly, throaty sound of its engine, and even if you were deaf you’d recognize a Spitfire. Benny couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that made this particular combination of metal, glass and rubber more beautiful than any other plane. It was like trying to say why one girl’s face was more beautiful than another’s. Just a perfect blend of angles and roundness in the features, perhaps? But something more. Something about the expression in the eyes. Mona from the shop wasn’t beautiful, but the memory of her body pressed against his, and her lips pushing on his mouth, made him feel a long tingle down his spine. He stood with Lord Dorner beside the car and half of him was in the woods with Mona and half was here at the airfield.

The Spit was coming in to land now, the light still bouncing against its metal surface as though a giant torch shone on it. The wheels came closer and closer to the runway. Benny could make out Lady Dorner in the cockpit. He heard Lord Dorner’s intake of breath. They said landings and take-offs were the most dangerous times. Unless the Luftwaffe happened upon you while you were up there in the sky, as sometimes happened to auxiliary pilots, with no guns to defend themselves.

The Spitfire was touching the runway now. Barely a bounce. Benny felt the warmth of relief, then a pang for Harriet Dorner. It must hurt, coming down to earth again.

‘Light as a fairy,’ Lord Dorner said. ‘Complete control.’ Pride oozed through his words. The plane came to a halt, resting so that its nose pointed skywards, keeping a lookout, Benny thought, in case it was needed again. The plane was smaller than he’d imagined it would be.

‘Come on, Benny, let’s go and congratulate her.’ Lord Dorner strode towards the Spitfire.

Benny hung back. It felt like a private moment, as if Harriet Dorner had been showing off their newborn to her husband. She opened the cockpit and climbed down in what seemed like a few graceful movements. As she pulled off her helmet and gloves the sun seemed to turn its rays directly onto her, illuminating her. Her gold hair was tied in a bun against her neck. She wore a butter-coloured flying jacket over her uniform, which she undid. Her complexion was the unblemished honey gold he remembered. No freckles on Lady Dorner. The men’s clothes and her scraped-back hair made her look even more feminine. Lord Dorner held her in a quick embrace and kissed her. Benny felt his own lips tingle as the middle-aged man’s mouth brushed her lips. He knew what that sensation felt like now, thanks to Mona. But imagining his lips on Lady Dorner’s, instead of Mona’s, made him want to run away and hide. Lady Dorner was his guardian.

In an attempt to suppress his confusion Benny moved towards the Spitfire, half expecting someone to shout a reprimand. The aroma of fuel and hot grease hung around the open cockpit, which was smaller than he’d imagined, almost perfectly designed for a woman of Lady Dorner’s build. The engine ticked as it cooled. Above the exhaust vents warm vapours shimmered. He looked over his shoulder, saw nobody was watching him, and touched the aluminium body reverentially before returning to the Dorners.

Harriet was laughing, telling her husband all about it. ‘Sitting in the cockpit’s like wearing a Hardy Amies suit,’ she said. ‘And you only need the slightest touch and she’ll turn like a sparrowhawk.’ She noticed Benny. ‘Benny! How wonderful to see you. I’m glad you’re not ill too.’ She put a hand to the bun of hair and released it so that the gold locks swung forward.

‘I saw you land,’ he said, feeling like an inarticulate chump. Only this very morning, out in the woods with Mona, Benny had imagined this to be the most exciting day he’d had in years. How low his standards had been.

BOOK: The One I Was
3.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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