Lost in the Flames (10 page)

‘Damned good bat, my arse,’ said Don. ‘Just wait till he gets a bit of Aussie leather round his chops.’

They set up a fire extinguisher as a wicket and Don fetched a bat and a ball and they began the inaugural intra-crew Test Match, Australia batting first and reaching twenty-five for no wicket, George providing a musical backdrop to the action with repeated drunken renditions of Waltzing Fucking Matilda, battering away at the piano as his voice filled the room, until a pair of navigation instructors heard the commotion and appeared at the door just as Don launched an elaborate cover drive that sent the ball into the heavy velvet drapes with a satisfying thwack.

‘What the bloody hell’s going on here, then, boys?’ called out one of the instructors in a Yorkshire burr, something wild in his eyes that needed release.

George finished his song with a furious flourish as the cricketers and the instructors all stared at him, and everyone burst out laughing.

‘Just whipping these Poms’ arses,’ said Don, gesturing towards Jacob, who had bowled the previous ball.

‘Yeah, that’s right, mate,’ said Jim, draining his pint.

‘We’re just getting to know each other better,’ said Ralph. ‘We’re crewed up with these strange marsupial cousins. Nothing wrong with a bit of colonial knockabout, is there?’

The two instructors looked at each other.

‘All right, my Aussie mates,’ came the Yorkshire growl. ‘You want a game of cricket, we’ll flippin’ give you one.’

He grabbed the ball from Jacob and walked back to the far end of the room and came in off his long run, letting rip at the Australian batsman from twelve yards, bowling the ball hard into the wooden floor. The bouncer reared up towards Don, who rocked back and hooked it away off the far wall.

‘Good shot that man!’ cried out Ralph. ‘I suggest we make you an honorary Englishman.’

‘Honorary Englishman, my arse!’ said Don, taking guard again and cutting the next ball away past the leather armchair positioned at extra cover.

‘And here we are at the WACA,’ stated Jim loudly, holding a bottle to his lips in imitation of a radio commentator at his microphone. ‘The Fremantle Doctor is howling hot across the ground and here comes Larwood again, bowling to the great Bradman, and the mighty Don swings him away again into the outfield and the Poms know they’re bloody beat.’

The game continued until the station commander, passing along the corridor outside, heard the enthusiastic cussing and the heavy smack of ball on bat.

‘What the blasted blue blazes are you lot up to?!’ he erupted from the doorway. ‘What do you think this is, a lunatic asylum?’

He marched up to the two errant instructors.

‘Get this lot back to their quarters. And you two, be in my office first thing tomorrow.’

‘They were good sports,’ said Jacob, as the crew walked back together to the barracks block afterwards. ‘I thought we were in for it when they appeared, thought we’d be sent packing to the bloody Army!’

‘So then, Charlie,’ said George in the bar the next night. ‘Where does a name like Appleford come from?’

‘Not Appleford,’ said Charlie. ‘Apple
forth
.’

‘Yes, sorry, Charles, old chap. Applefart. Born within earshot of the Bow Bells, I’m afraid, lost my hearing when I was just a nipper.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ mouthed Charlie silently. ‘Can you hear me now you big clot?’

‘Eh? Eh? Applefart?’

‘Go to hell, George,’ said Charlie. ‘Appleforth is a fine Kentish name.’

‘And what do you do in Kent for fun?’ asked Jacob. ‘Apple bobbing and church fetes, I should guess.’

‘I’d guess?’ said George. ‘You know old Charlie’s a vicar’s son. That’s all they do, those holy types. Cakes at the Sunday stalls and plenty of chat about the impressive size of old Mr Appleforth’s marrows and orange pippins.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Charlie, ‘I have to admit I’ve seen some pretty ferocious scuffling around the cake stand at the church harvest fete, small children and their pocket money, steady flights of angel cakes. You know, that wild Saturday afternoon hunger.’

‘Oh, I know it well,’ said George. ‘I know it well …’

And he turned his head and made a comment to Don and they both laughed, but Charlie did not notice because he was thinking of old Mr Appleforth, a man of God but also a man of the soil, an academic who revelled in the poetry of prayer and the pleasures of the potato and the plough. On days when he had no parishioners to visit and time on his hands, he would take long walks out to the neighbouring farms and assist the labourers in their humble tasks, returning home in the early evening to flick through the Bible before dinner with hands grubbied by toil and fingernails that sheltered half a field of loam. Charlie was the Appleforths’ only child and shared his father’s contemplative bent and his mother’s owlish stare. He excelled at school and was destined to follow his father into the clergy when the war intervened.

‘When the Heinkels were over Kent,’ Charlie suddenly found himself declaring, ‘I made clear my intentions to volunteer for the RAF.
My father looked up from where he was engaged in a war of attrition with the rows of beans that he sowed like a sapper sowing mines. “Charles,” he said to me, “your first duty is to God, but your second is to your country. May the Lord give you wings, may he watch over you when you fly, and may he bring you home to us again when this godforsaken war is over.” So I fucked off to Canada and got my wings.’

The others all fell about laughing at Charlie’s uncharacteristic use of such a forceful expletive, and Jacob applauded.

‘Well done, Charlie, well done. Spoken like one of us.’

‘And you, George,’ said Charlie, emboldened by the reaction. ‘What made you join up?’

‘I saw the Blitz, that was enough. Winter 1940, and my gran lit up like a candle on the sofa when an incendiary came through the roof. That made up my mind, all right, an eye for an eye …’

‘Even if it does leave all men blind?’ said Jacob.

‘Too bloody right. I signed up the next day for bomber crew. Next time it’ll be me over a city dropping bombs and incendiaries, and I’ll rejoice when that day comes, I can tell you, because I know what it means.’

‘I assume that’s an apocryphal tale, old chap?’ said Ralph.

‘A what?’ said George. ‘Come on, skip, I haven’t got your education. Speak to me plain and proper, now.’

‘The thing about your granny. Granny and the incendiary. That can’t be true.’

‘Well they took her away in a fucking bag, skip, if that’s what you mean. Like taking away a dog.’

‘I’m awfully sorry, George, honestly I am,’ said Ralph, as the others nodded. ‘But listen, to lighten the mood, I’ll tell you another tale of an apocryphal bent. Something I heard from my babysitter when I was a youngster. She’d worked as an assistant at London Zoo, and after she’d been at my father’s Beaujolais – as she invariably was – she would always trot out her tale about the South American parrot that learned to quote lines from T.S.Eliot’s
The Waste Land
at old ladies. Can you imagine that, not just a talking parrot, but a poetic one too? April is the cruellest month, says this bloody parrot, breeding lilacs out of the dead land …’

He burst out laughing but stopped abruptly when the others did not follow. ‘Well, I guess you had to be there,’ he said.

‘I don’t suppose that was Chesterton, by any chance?’ said Jacob.

‘Afraid not, old chap. Why?’

‘Oh, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you another time.’

And Jacob thought again of Rose as he drank down his beer.

Ralph had not suffered the privations of the Blitz and the wasteland it brought, Jacob could sense that in him, nor any other great hardships in his formative years, unless you count the sting of a scorpion still slumbering in his shoe at dawn, or the primal fear provoked in the heart of a young boy by the roar of the lion in the night as he slept in a tented encampment ringed by thorn-bush. The son of a surgeon, born in South Africa and raised in Rhodesia until the family tired of life half a world away from the mother country, Ralph was ten when they returned to the Surrey countryside, moving into a large Victorian house set in acres of meadowland and woods and with four tall brick chimneys, one for each fireplace, and a lake to one side on which Ralph and his three sisters spent summer afternoons afloat in a flat-bottomed punt as dragonflies alighted on the water and lifted up again, leaving tiny rings where they had been. Ralph’s father took the train to London each morning and returned late in the evening as the children were going to bed, and Ralph would lie in bed in his own large room at the top of the stairs and listen to his parents’ conversations about the surgical peculiarities of the day, Mrs Andrews’ afternoon at the old people’s home where once a week she helped with the tea and sandwiches, and the West End theatre tickets that Mr Andrews had brought home for the weekend. Often the tickets were for a matinee, and the trip into London would be an all-day Saturday family affair involving Welsh rarebit beforehand and cake and tea afterwards, but once a month the trips into London were the evening preserve of Mr and Mrs Andrews, and by the time the baby-sitter had arrived Mrs Andrews would be ready to leave, wearing a dark blue cashmere coat and a white silk scarf and surrounded by a small invisible cloud of Eau de Cologne, smelling as Ralph’s youngest sister always put it ‘of Paris’, or as Ralph joked, of northern Germany. As Mr and Mrs Andrews walked to the car and Mr Andrews opened the door with suburban ceremony, Mrs Gibbons, the baby-sitter, would open the larder and
start preparing for herself an ample plate of confectionery and buttery goods and a large glass of Mr Andrews’ Beaujolais, and she would turn on the radio, sit herself down heavily on the Chesterfield – sending one or other of the adjacent children upwards as if on a see-saw – and munch her way through the first hour of the evening as the children urged her to tell them ever more outlandish stories about her time as a veterinary assistant at London Zoo. By the time the Andrews returned from the theatre, their daughters would be in bed and Mrs Gibbons asleep on the sofa with the radio trilling away on one side and Ralph curled up and muttering in his sleep on the other. This happy state of affairs continued until the evening that Mrs Gibbons failed to arrive and Mr Andrews picked up the phone and received the news that she had succumbed to a massive stroke, and after that it was the Andrews who occasionally went to see Mrs Gibbons at her home, but the stories had stopped and the appetite was gone and she spent the rest of her days immobile and Ralph often wondered if her inability to respond signified too an inability to comprehend and to reason, or whether the stories perhaps still spilled about in her head with no means of expression, a camera clicking away full rolls of film that could never emerge from her darkroom. At thirteen, Ralph was sent away to a Hertfordshire boarding school. He enrolled in the flying club and this fed a growing interest in the machines that one day might bear him up into the air, and this interest endured beyond his schooldays and into his first year at university in Oxford, where the flying club was more practice than theory. Notionally at Oxford to study Mathematics, Ralph spent his days pursuing his four main interests, all of which came to him easily – flying, motorbikes, cricket, and girls. He had spent his summer holidays in his teens around his three older sisters and their female friends, and this had taught him a confident manner and a certain proficiency in the language of charm, and he put this domestic practice to good use once he found himself in the fresh pastures of Oxford. At weekends his motorbike sped him and a companion along the country roads outside Oxford, north through Woodstock and out past Chipping Norton and into the chocolate-box countryside around Burford and the Wychwoods and he got to know the hayfields and the soft riverbanks intimately, and the soft intimacy of his companions too, and they would ride back to Oxford with the setting sun at their backs, the throb of the motorbike below, and the warm glow of physical
proximity all around them.

When the war came, Mr Andrews, overly familiar with what sharp metal objects could do to a human body, had forbidden Ralph to put himself forward for the Services until he must, but within a year Ralph had rebelled and was on his way to South Africa under the Empire Air Training Scheme and now, in the early months of 1943, he was Pilot Officer Ralph Andrews, RAF Bomber Command, the captain of a crew comprising a pair of lean plain-speaking Australians, a thoughtful vicar’s son, a vengeful survivor of the London Blitz, and a bomb-aimer from an average family in Chipping Norton, the quiet town through which Ralph had roared on his motorbike in the months before the war.

They received their posting to a Heavy Conversion Unit in Lincolnshire and were assigned a flight engineer as the final permanent member of their crew.

‘Twenty-eight!’ said Jacob, when Roland Reynolds told them his age. ‘You’re an old bloody man. What are doing signing up with a bunch of sprogs like us?’

‘Someone’s got to look after you, pal,’ grinned Roland.

‘That’s the skip’s job, mate,’ said Don. ‘Ain’t it skip?’

Ralph nodded and smiled, then patted Roland on the shoulder. ‘Where are you from, Roland? I detect a Highland burr.’

‘Yes sir, Aberdeen. I’ve got a wife and son there now, born just last summer, the wee kid.’

He lapsed into silence as his thoughts turned to home.

‘Well, you’ll be seeing them again soon, don’t you worry about that,’ said Ralph. ‘And don’t worry so much about the sir. We don’t bother with that kind of thing in this crew.’

The days were filled with cross-country flights and fighter affiliation training and advanced bombing techniques, and Ralph frequently let Jacob take the controls and fly the plane, just as he had at the OTU, for you never knew if something might happen to the pilot on an op and it was just as well that Jacob, having trained initially as a pilot, should familiarise himself with the controls and the behaviour of the Lancaster.

At the end of their time at the HCU, the crew were given a week’s
leave and they headed south on the train. The two Australians went with Jacob to Chipping Norton and they spent three days at Mill View Cottage. Jacob took them down to see Vera and Norman at Elm Tree Farm, where Norman quizzed them about Australian livestock and the vast quantities of sheep he had read about in the agricultural journals.