I'll Be Seeing You (14 page)

He shrugged. ‘Must've been. I can only remember him as Ham.'

He gave me back my photo and moved off to board the coach. William followed, to give the conducted tour of the airfield, and I went into the house in search of his aunt. I found her sitting alone in the drawing room, an old photo album open on her knees. She looked up with a smile. ‘I've been taking a trip down memory lane. And I've found the photo of Daisy. Do you know, I can even remember my mother snapping it with her box Brownie.' She patted the sofa seat beside her. ‘Come and take a look.'

Ma wasn't in WAAF uniform; instead, she was wearing bibbed dungarees and a blouse and she was standing beside a cornstook. The dungarees looked much too big and she'd tied them round her waist with string. She was wearing a spotted scarf round her hair. I knew the scarf: it was red and white and she had had it for years. Flavia and I had found it when we were going through her clothes and had kept it in the suitcase, to remember her by.

‘It was exactly this time of year – harvest time. She was helping with it, so I suppose she must have had some leave then. And I remember that the Americans used to come over and help too. Father must have been glad of all the extra hands he could get in those days. Here, you have it.'

She detached the photo carefully from its corners and gave it to me. We went through the album, looking at snaps of herself and her brother as children, of the house and the garden, of dogs and cats, the ducks on the pond, the farmworkers in the yard, the grandfather driving a tractor – still only a young man, then. And, further on, pictures of Americans in uniform standing around on the sunlit lawn, talking and drinking. I studied those closely but most had their backs turned, or were too far away to see clearly. There were a few shots of the airfield, too, taken at a distance – of the control tower and hangars, Jeeps and trucks and men, and of bombers – one of them taking off.

‘Photography was strictly forbidden, of course,' Madeleine Lucas said. ‘But Mother did it just the same. I've still got her box Brownie somewhere.' She closed the album. ‘Did you have any luck with your crew photograph?'

‘Some.' I told her what had happened and she asked to see it again. I pointed out the pilot.

She looked at it more closely than before. ‘Of course, you can't see him properly but, you know, I think I
do
remember him. It's that smile . . . One of them came upstairs once when Daisy was reading us a bedtime story. He stayed in the doorway, listening, and I'm sure it was this one. I might be wrong, though. The Americans were always smiling at us. Always laughing and joking and playing games. I suppose we must have reminded them of their brothers and sisters back home – the families they'd left behind. But I remember
his
smile particularly. I'm not quite sure why. You know how you remember certain things very vividly from childhood – for no particular reason.'

‘He looks tall in the photo.'

‘I expect he was – most of them were. Tall, strong young men. Or so they seemed to us, at our age. They used to pick Peter up and carry him around on their shoulders. I was a bit too big for that.' She looked at me. ‘I won't ask why you want to find him so much – it's none of my business. But I do hope you do.'

I had part of a name and part of a face, and an American state. And two people remembered him. It was progress – of a kind.

Later, I drove back across the old airfield – past the huts and the hangers. I stopped at the control tower and went through the visitors' book again. There was only one entry of any possible significance – a Sven L. Hammerskeld, but he was from Minnesota which I knew was way up in the far north of the United States, almost in Canada. It seemed extremely unlikely that a warm-weather-loving Californian would ever have moved there.

I carried on slowly down the length of the main runway with its rustling skirts of wheat. And I thought of Maryland's heartfelt entry in the visitors' book.
So many ghosts. So many memories
.

When the war started on 3rd September 1939, Daisy Woods was sixteen years old, still at school and living with her family in Ealing, west London. Her older sisters, Violet and Lily, both secretaries, volunteered immediately for the WRNS. Iris, the next in age, escaped from a bank to join the Women's Land Army, while Primrose, who had just finished her schooling, went off to drive ambulances for the FANYs. It took Daisy a year to persuade her parents to let her leave school. By then the Battle of Britain was being fought and the country on the brink of invasion by the Germans. Then the Blitz began. She was still too young to join any of the services and so she spent the waiting time learning shorthand and typing. As soon as she had passed her diploma, she presented herself at a recruiting office for the Women's Auxiliary Royal Air Force and three months later she received a letter instructing her to report for initial training.

Morecambe in October was cold and wet, the billet uncomfortable and the food revolting, but she enjoyed the rest of it – the marching around, the PT, the lectures, even wearing the uniform, and she made friends easily with the other girls. When the training was over she was given seven days' leave which she spent at home in Ealing, during which time the Japanese bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war. Vernon from next door happened to be home too. In past years, when they were children, he would have climbed over the garden fence; now that they were grown-up he rang politely at the front door.

‘I heard you were back, Daisy. How did it go?'

‘Not so bad. I'm being posted to Suffolk – to an RAF bomber station. Aircraftwoman Woods, clerk, general duties – but I think I'm going to be chained to a typewriter.'

‘Will you mind?'

‘I'd sooner have done something a bit more exciting, but they latched onto my shorthand and typing. How about you, Vernon? How's Cambridge?'

He adjusted his spectacles. ‘Actually, I'm not at Cambridge any more – not since last January. I've been given a wartime job. Sort of commandeered. Cambridge will have to wait until after it's all over.'

‘What sort of job?'

‘Oh, nothing very special. Just government communications. But it makes up for being turned down by the services.'

They'd rejected him because of his poor eyesight and she knew it had hurt. While other young men were marching off to war, he'd been left behind to explain why he hadn't gone with them. She said, ‘I'm really glad for you. It's bound to be something important, if they've sought you out. Is it to do with the maths?'

‘Sort of.'

‘So we're both doing our bit.'

He smiled at her. ‘Yes, we are.'

He'd grown up, but he had scarcely changed from the shy boy with wire-framed spectacles and sticking-up hair who had peered over the fence one day years ago when his family had moved in next door – the only child of old-fashioned parents who had seemed more like grandparents. Violet and Lily and Iris had alarmed him and Primrose had teased him, though not unkindly, but Daisy had understood his shyness and his loneliness. He was exceptionally clever, especially at maths which was her worst subject, and he had often helped her with her school homework. The A plus marks and ‘Excellent's that she had received had been entirely due to Vernon, until finally the teacher had rumbled why her classwork was so poor by comparison. After that, she went back to the B minuses and Cs.

She said, ‘I think the war's going to go on for ages, Vernon, don't you?'

‘I'm afraid so. We haven't been doing too well in North Africa. Or in the Atlantic. And the Japanese seem to be going full steam ahead in the Far East. Still, we're getting one or two breaks, at last, and the Americans will make a big difference, now they're with us. It gives us a chance.'

‘Why on earth didn't they come and help us before?'

‘I suppose a lot of them didn't see why they should get involved, since it wasn't their war. They needed a good enough reason.'

‘Well, they've got one now – thanks to the Japanese. I hope they're going to help us fight the Germans as well.'

He said, ‘I think it's going to be a long, hard struggle, but we'll win through in the end. For one thing, Hitler never managed to invade England, so the Americans will have an ideal base for their troops to get at Germany.'

He didn't stay much longer. He had to get back, he said. They'd only given him the one day off to come home and see his father, who wasn't at all well.

‘Yes, we know. I'm very sorry. I hope he gets better.' The man who had always seemed old as God to her, had had a stroke and was, apparently, in a bad way.

‘Which RAF station in Suffolk are they posting you to?' he asked. ‘I'll write to you there – if that's all right. And will you let me know how you're getting on?'

She promised she would and waved to him from the front door as he went. His clothes had never seemed to fit him in the past – the grey shorts always too long, the school caps too big or too small, the blazers looking as though they belonged to some other boy. Now, his tweed overcoat flapped about him as he walked, the brown trilby looked a size too small and the long woollen scarf trailed, unwound, from his neck.

‘He's sweet on you – you know that, don't you?' Primrose had once told her. ‘Dotty about you, poor old thing.'

He'd never said so in words, but she knew that it was true. And she knew that
he
knew that she was awfully fond of him – but that that was all. The difficulty was not to hurt him.

Halfpenny Green, the RAF station in Suffolk, turned out to be both good and bad. The good part was that it was in beautiful countryside near a lovely village; the bad that the station itself was cold, damp, muddy, and uncomfortable. It had been built – recently and hurriedly – on land requisitioned from a farmer and the buildings were prefabricated huts and sheds of corrugated iron, bolted together and laid on concrete foundations, heated, if at all, by temperamental stoves with a measly ration of coke. Draughty, cheerless and bleak. The squadron flew twin-engined bombers – Blenheims and Bostons – and shortly after she arrived, there was a raid on Bremen with no aircraft lost. Most ops, she soon discovered, were not anything like as successful. There had been steady losses of men and planes, repeated failures even to find targets, let alone hit them, and bombers constantly turning back. The winter weather hadn't exactly helped – the fogs, the dense cloud, the ice and snow, were all as much their enemy as the Germans.

She had no difficulty settling in with the other WAAFs, who were a decent, friendly lot. As she had expected, she found herself chained to a typewriter, bashing away at routine letters and memos and long lists, and envying the WAAFs who were doing far more interesting things – plotting in the ops room, enciphering and deciphering secret messages, operating radios, interpreting raid and reconnaissance photos. Her application to transfer trades was turned down flat; she had learned shorthand and typing too well to be spared.

She watched the crews come and go. Thirty ops to a tour and then they were done – if they survived. Some did, some didn't. The unlucky ones simply vanished. One moment they were there walking around, living and breathing, talking, laughing, the next they weren't. Lockers and drawers were instantly cleared, beds stripped, no traces left to discourage their replacements or upset station morale. Early on, she learned that it was better to avoid getting to know any of them too well: much less heart-breaking. But sometimes it happened.

She met Bill in the Mad Monk, the most popular of the three pubs in Halfpenny Green. There was a well-trodden footpath leading from the airfield perimeter down through a wood to the village – a wood where nightingales were supposed to sing in the spring and early summer. As usual, the bar was crowded with RAF and WAAF and with Land Army girls from the hostel nearby. Bill was standing at the bar, pint mug in his fist, talking to another officer, and turned his head and smiled at her across the room. From the wings on his chest, she saw that he was a pilot and therefore one of those who could so easily do the vanishing act at any time; it seemed only kind to smile back. After a while, he elbowed his way through the crush to where she was standing and smiled at her again.

‘How do you do? I'm Bill Hudson. What're you drinking?'

He was from Yorkshire with a Yorkshireman's blunt speech and ways. She liked him a lot and went on liking him until he was killed three months later on a raid over Cologne. After that, she avoided the crews completely.

Spring arrived and the weather improved, making more bombing raids possible and more aircraft and their men liable to vanish. Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Wilhelmshaven, Düsseldorf, Hanover, Kiel . . . raid after raid throughout the spring and summer of 1941. During the summer and autumn more prefabricated buildings were erected on the station and there were rumours – rumours that the squadron might be switching to four-engined bombers, rumours of heavier and still heavier raids being planned, rumours of all kinds, including that the American Air Force was coming.

On the day when the Japanese had attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Howard Hamilton had been in his fourth and final year at Berkeley university in northern California. As soon as he had heard the news, he had slung his belongings together, got into his hot rod and driven very fast down the Pacific Coast highway to his home in Pasadena, east of Los Angeles. On arrival, he had told his parents that he was volunteering at once for the US Army Air Corps. They had made no attempt to dissuade him, knowing it would be a waste of breath. He was twenty-one, had held a private pilot's licence at seventeen and flown their Aeronca Chief all around California and the neighbouring states. His current girlfriend, Lola, the latest in a long line, had wept on his shoulder, but to no avail.