The Fleethaven Trilogy (78 page)

‘How are you getting on with the CO? Is he as nice as he looks?’

‘Every bit,’ Kate said. Again she made no reference to the fact that she and Group Captain Philip Trent had met before, or that he owed his life to her. It was a secret best kept between the two of them. He had done her an enormous favour in arranging for her to be his driver, but neither of them wanted it common knowledge that he had singled her out for biased treatment.

‘Of course, he’s a bit old for you, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, Mavis, really!’ Kate laughed. ‘The thought never even crossed my mind . . .’ But then she remembered his intense gaze across the desk on the day of her arrival. It was more than just a ‘thank you for saving my life’ look.

‘How old do you reckon he is, then?’

‘Forty-ish, I should think.’

‘Is he married?’

‘Oh Mavis, really. I just drive him about – I don’t get to know his life history. It’s – all very official,’ she added, hesitating over the lie.

‘I’ll find out,’ Mavis said confidently and Kate knew she would.

In the seclusion of the staff car, the CO’s attitude towards his driver was anything but ‘official’.

‘Is everything okay in the WAAF quarters? Are you quite comfortable? You can tell me, you know, Kate, quite unofficially. I could try to find you a room in my office block, if you would prefer it.’

She was surprised to hear herself saying. ‘Oh no, thank you. I like being with the other girls.’ Who would have believed it, she thought, that I could ever come to terms with sleeping in a dormitory of sorts again? ‘The only thing is, when you don’t need me – there’s not much for me to do.’ She smiled. ‘I can only polish and tinker with this car for so many hours in a day.’

‘Well, my demands on your time will no doubt get heavier when we get fully operational, which should be by next week. We shall have two squadrons of bombers here by then. But the station will be very stretched for staff and you may well find yourself being detailed to do other jobs, such as driving the crewbus taking the chaps out to the aircraft when there’s an op on. I shall be around myself then anyway.’ There was an expression of regret on his face as he met her glance in the rear-view mirror. ‘It’s the nearest I shall be able to get to flying with them.’

Kate was not surprised; she had known instinctively that Philip would be a fully committed and caring Commanding Officer, nor was she surprised to hear he lamented the fact that his senior post had virtually grounded him.

As she pulled up outside the Control Tower, and was about to jump out of the car to open the rear door for him, he leaned forward and touched her shoulder. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing you want?’

‘Well . . .’ she hesitated.

‘Go on,’ he prompted.

‘I – I don’t suppose it would be possible to get Danny posted to this station, would it?’

She thought she heard him sigh softly. ‘Are you sure it’s what you really want, Kate? Wouldn’t it be worse for you knowing when he was flying, waiting for his plane to come back?’

She gripped the steering-wheel, her knuckles showing white. ‘I – don’t know. All I know is that not knowing where he is, or what he’s doing, or if he’s safe, is unbearable.’

There was a flatness to his voice as he said, ‘I’ll see what I can do, Kate. But I can’t promise anything.’

Before she could move, he had opened the door himself and got out of the car, his long strides taking him towards the building without looking back at her.

Kate bit her lip. Now she did not know whether to wait here for him or go back to the MT yard. Sighing, she got out of the car and followed him. It would be better to hang about waiting for him even if he didn’t want her, than to disappear and be missing when he did!

He was in the Met Office on the ground floor talking to Edith who was standing, not exactly to attention, but rigidly upright, answering his questions with a clipped ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir’.

Kate saw Philip’s glance flicker over her but he looked away and concentrated again upon Edith.

Kate went up the concrete stairs to the upper floor. The walls were freshly painted, the top half cream with bottle-green at the bottom. The smell of the paint still lingered. She passed the Signals Room and peeked round the door of the Control Room. Directly in front of her sat Mavis with headphones over her short, springy brown hair. Beside her sat Isobel, leaning forward and listening intently to what Mavis was telling her. There were all sorts of instruments and telephones on the long desk in front of them and on the walls were maps and clocks and blackboards giving local weather conditions and target information. Most interesting of all to Kate was the large operations blackboard with ‘SUDDABY’ painted in white at the top followed by its call sign, then the squadron numbers and their call signs. In the middle was the word ‘RAID’ with a blank space for the name to be chalked in each time. Below that was a blank white-painted grid where a WAAF would stand to fill in all the details of each aircraft as it took off on a raid giving the pilot’s name, the take-off time and the column everyone watched anxiously: ‘RETURN’.

To Kate’s left as she stood in the doorway, sat a man at a table. This must be the famous Dave, she thought.

As if feeling her gaze upon him, the Flight Sergeant looked up and grinned at her.

‘Hello. Come to see what we get up to here?’

‘I’m with the CO,’ Kate said. ‘He’s downstairs.’

Dave winked. ‘Thanks for the tip-off.’

At the sound of Kate’s voice, Mavis looked around. ‘Hello, Kate.’ But immediately she turned back to the instruments on her desk.

Dave nodded towards her. ‘She’s good, is our Mavis. Friend of yours, is she?’

Kate nodded.

At that moment, hearing footsteps on the stairs and seeing Philip appear in the passage behind her, she moved aside to allow him to come into the Control Room.

Standing in the background, she watched while Philip spoke to each person there. As he paused behind Mavis, Kate saw Isobel look up at him, tilting her head coyly, her blue eyes shining and a smile curving her mouth. He spoke briefly to her and then bent over Mavis to talk to her. Kate was amused to see that Isobel bent forward with a semblance of keen concentration. She heard Philip’s deep laugh, Mavis’s giggle and Isobel’s tinkling, affected laughter. As Philip straightened up and turned away to speak to another WAAF on the other side of the room, Isobel glanced at Kate. There was a look of triumph on her face and then, as she continued to stare at Kate, a slight frown creased her smooth forehead as if she were trying to draw something out that was nudging at the depths of her memory, something she could not quite catch and hold on to. Kate felt the old fluttering just beneath her ribs.

One of these days, Isobel was going to remember . . .

At that moment they all heard the distinctive sound of the air-raid siren.

‘Right, everybody to the shelters,’ Philip said calmly, and waited until everyone had preceded him out of the room.

‘Come on, Mavis, don’t hang about,’ Dave’s voice was sharp but Kate noticed he made no move himself until Mavis had pulled off her earphones, pushed on her tin hat, grabbed her gas mask and followed Isobel who was already heading for the stairs. Kate felt Philip grasp her arm firmly and propel her out and across the grass to the trench shelter. The winter sky hummed and, fascinated, Kate looked up to see two fighter planes wheeling and diving around each other, guns spurting death.

‘They’ll crash into each other,’ she gasped.

Beside her, Philip said grimly, ‘It happens.’

As it became obvious that the warning had not been for a bombing raid on the airfield, personnel began to emerge from the shelters again to stand watching the fight taking place above them. The aircraft with the circular red, white and blue emblem of the RAF had the black plane in its sights. The enemy aircraft twisted and dived, but to no avail; the British pilot followed his every move as if an invisible cord tied them together. Suddenly, they saw black smoke trailing from the enemy plane. Forgetting where they were, Kate gripped Philip’s arm, her horrified gaze watching the aircraft screaming towards the ground, the smoke slashing the grey sky. As the plane hit the ground and burst into flames, around her there came the sound of cheering and against the clouds the Spitfire rolled victoriously.

Philip was silent.

‘There – there was no parachute, was there?’

‘No, Kate,’ he answered quietly as they stood together watching the pall of smoke on the far side of the airfield marking wreckage. As fire engines set off across the grass towards it, the all-clear sounded.

Around them there was laughter and congratulation, but Kate could not join in. Despite the fact that she had joined the battle and knew they must fight to the bitter end, nevertheless she could feel no elation at witnessing the death of another human being.

The dead enemy pilot was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother.

The thought pushed its unwelcome way into her mind; it could so easily have been Danny.

T
he following morning, Kate received a letter from Danny. It was enclosed in a letter from her stepfather. Kate tossed that aside and ripped open the letter from Danny. It was short and didn’t tell her very much, but he gave her an address she could write to and he told her he was well and that he would be going home on leave in just over a week. Was there any chance she could get leave at the same time, he asked.

Any chance? Oh, she’d get it if she had to beg on bended knee. Of course, although it wasn’t normal procedure, with her unusual relationship with the CO, she could ask Philip personally.

She glanced at her watch. She was due to drive him into Lincoln in about half an hour to catch a train north.

The expression on Philip’s face, when he got into the back of the car, was not encouraging. He seemed preoccupied and his eyes were tired. His face looked drawn and strained and the smile, which so altered his expression, was missing. He nodded briefly at her, but sat back in his seat, his shoulders rigid. In the rear mirror she saw him remove his cap and run his hand through his springy, short-cut hair. She could feel the tension in him. Kate bit her lip. She desperately wanted to ask him to approve at least a forty-eight-hour pass for her to coincide with Danny’s leave, but above the noise of the large car’s engine, it would mean shouting back to him.

She drew into the station and jumped out to open the door for him. As he bent his head to climb out, she saluted smartly as always, but said softly, ‘Sir?’

He straightened up and looked down at her, frowning. ‘What is it?’ he almost barked at her.

‘I – I was wondering how long you w-will be away, sir,’ she stammered, deciding instantly that he was in no mood to grant favours, and floundering to think of something – anything – to ask.

‘I’ll be gone about five days. If you can meet me off the train on Tuesday evening – it gets in about six – I’d be grateful.’

He turned and strode away and Kate found herself saluting to no one in particular.

‘Damn!’ she muttered to herself as she got back into the car and wove her way out of Lincoln and back towards the station.

‘Oh, I can’t grant you leave. There’s no knowing this far ahead what “Sir” will be doing. You took the job as his driver,’ the WAAF officer said sarcastically. ‘It’s a cushy number, Hilton, so you take the rough with the smooth. You knew you would have to be on call virtually all the time. You’ll have to apply through the usual channels.’

So Kate was obliged to reply to Danny’s letter explaining the situation. She finished off on a hopeful note. ‘I’ll do my best though – perhaps I could even ask the CO when he comes back on Tuesday.’

That night as they lay in bed after lights out, Kate was still trying to work out how she was going to wangle some leave to coincide with Danny’s. She lay in her narrow bed, feeling the ridges of the three-section ‘biscuit’ mattress beneath her and staring up with sleepless eyes into the blackness of the rafters. She listened to the steady breathing of the other girls; a cough here, a gentle snore, a murmur there.

Then, above her head she heard a scuffling noise. A noise that was familiar to her and reminded her sharply of home.

In the darkness, Kate smiled.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she awoke with a start to a piercing scream.

Immediately, pandemonium broke out.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Is it an air-raid?’

‘There’s a feller in here – must be!’

The door opened and the corporal flashed her torch around the hut. Isobel was standing on her bed shrieking, clutching her nightdress to her.

‘Cartwright. Stop that noise at once.’

But the noise did not stop, if anything, the pitch heightened. Isobel was clearly genuinely terrified.

Kate swung her legs out of bed. On bare feet she padded across the wooden floor. Calmly she said, ‘May I borrow your torch a mo, Corp?’

Handing it over, the officer said, ‘Do you know what’s the matter with her, Hilton?’

‘I’ve a good idea.’

Kate left the room for a moment to delve in the cupboard outside the corporal’s room. Now some of the other girls were getting decidedly nervous. ‘Kate, bring the light back.’

‘Won’t be a minute. Hang on. Ah, here it is.’

She returned brandishing a broom. ‘Now then, mester, let’s be ’aving ya.’

‘Heavens! Is it a man?’ Mavis’s voice broke in comically. ‘I was only joking – at least I thought I was!’

‘Let’s just say it’s an unwelcome visitor.’

‘Something – fell – on my bed and,’ Isobel stuttered ‘and – ran across my legs!’

Kate turned the torch beam to the roof and ran the beam of light along the rafters. ‘Ah,’ she smiled her triumph. ‘There you are, Mester Rat!’

The whole room erupted in screams. All the girls were now standing on their beds, pressing themselves back against the wall, staring with horrified eyes at the little creature crouching on one of the rafters, its bright eyes shining in the light from the torch. To Kate’s amusement, even the corporal took a flying leap on to the nearest bed, nearly knocking the occupant off the other side.