‘Sometimes I think my life is just passing me by,’ Baby said, pouting at her reflection in the mirror. Her latest perm hadn’t been at all successful. All the waves were going the wrong way.
‘No it ain’t,’ Megan said cheerfully. ‘What are you on about?’
‘I’m all by myself in this family,’ Baby complained, spreading scarlet lipstick across her top lip. ‘That’s what I’m on about. Nobody ever thinks of me. Jim’s come home on a forty-eight so of course Peggy’s gone rushing off to Croydon with him. I don’t count any more once he’s home. Joan’s got a week’s holiday. A whole week. You’d think she could spend a bit of time with her sister on a week’s holiday. But oh dear no. She’s taken the kids off somewhere instead. She’s always taking the kids off somewhere. Mum’s at the pictures. Surprise surprise! Even the cat’s gone out. I don’t know why I bother.’
‘Well I’m here now,’ Megan said, ignoring the complaint. ‘Where d’you want to go? Pictures? Up the palais? You say.’
They’d planned this outing at the last ding-dong when Megan was rather jolly with drink and although she’d had second thoughts about it she was keeping her promise. You had to feel sorry for Baby sometimes. She never seemed to have any friends.
‘John from the paint shop was going to take me out, you know,’ Baby said, powdering her nose. ‘And then he came in yesterday and said he couldn’t. Not a word about being sorry or anything. Just he couldn’t. “Oh charming!” I said. “That’s really charming.” And do you know what he said then? He never meant to take me out anyway. It was just a dare. “Oh really charming!” I said.’
‘No. Not yet. Well then he said. “You’re not Betty Grable you know!” I was livid …’
‘Are we going?’ Megan asked, standing up and slinging her gasmask over her shoulder.
Baby spread another layer of lipstick across her mouth. ‘So I was telling you,’ she said.
‘You don’t need any more lipstick,’ Megan said. ‘You got enough on already.’
‘Oh that’s right,’ Baby said petulantly. ‘Tell me off. Criticize. I should. Everybody tells me off.’
‘I wasn’t telling you off,’ Megan said, floundering in the sudden backwash of Baby’s heavy emotions. ‘I was only saying…’
‘Everybody tells me off,’ Baby said, tears welling into her eyes. ‘I can’t do a thing right. Ever. Oh now look! You’ve made my mascara run.’ Black streaks were falling from her wet eyelashes and meandering down her carefully rouged cheeks. ‘Oh God! I look an absolute sight!’ and she ran through the kitchen, pushed past Megan and clattered upstairs.
Now what? Megan thought. She is peculiar. No wonder she ain’t got any friends if she goes on like this all the time.
There was a rattle at the front door as the key was pulled through the letter-box. She could hear voices. Jim’s and Peggy’s. Well thank heavens for that.
‘Hello,’ Peggy said. ‘You still here? I thought you’d have gone by now. What’s up?’
‘Your sister is,’ Megan said.
‘Where is she?’
‘Upstairs. In a paddy.’
‘Megan’s waiting for you, Baby,’ Jim called up the stairs. ‘Are you coming down?’
‘Oh do go away,’ Baby’s voice replied. It sounded muffled and tearful. ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘I’d give up if I were you,’ Jim said to Megan. ‘If she’s piping her eye you could be here for hours. Come to Croydon with us. We’re going to visit Froggy and his sister.’
‘I promised to go out with her,’ Megan said, looking very uncertain. They could hear Baby sobbing in the room above their heads.
‘He’s quite right,’ Peggy said. ‘She could go on like this for ages. She can be a real pest sometimes.’
‘Are you coming down or ain’t yer?’ Jim called again.
‘Go away!’ Baby wailed.
So Megan went to Croydon with Jim and Peggy.
It was 15 August 1940 and a glorious summer afternoon. Croydon was quite perky in the sunshine with the trolley buses shining red as tulips and the glass of the shop windows glinting and dazzling between its protective lattice-work of brown paper. They took a 42 tram down North End, passing the new white frontage of Allder’s department store and the age-blackened bricks of the Whitgift Hospital, in a street full of affluent shoppers. Megan was most impressed, both by the width of the street and the wealth of the shops. ‘Better’n Greenwich by a long chalk’. But Peggy was thinking what a lot of uniforms there were in the streets these days, soldiers, airmen, WVS, even the occasional sailor swaggering along, bell-bottoms flapping.
‘We’re all at war now,’ she said to Jim.
‘Not today,’ he said, giving her a squeeze. ‘Day off today.’ And his eyes said, ‘love tonight.’
The unspoken message roused her most pleasurably but the pleasure trailed shame in its wake. She wanted to sleep with him, of course, of course, but it was still wrong what they were doing. They should have waited. But how could they wait? How could they marry with a war going on, and everything changed and God knows what ahead of them?
‘Here we are,’ Jim said.
Froggy’s sister turned out to be a neat young woman in her middle thirties called Claire. She didn’t look a bit like her brother, which Peggy thought privately was just as well. She had a rather wider mouth than most women and she shared Froggy’s pale colouring but her eyes were small and shrewd and her head neatly shingled and she was stylishly dressed, in a trim yellow tea-gown that put her two guests at a disadvantage in their cheap skirts and home-made blouses.
But she was a good hostess and made them all very welcome, serving them a three course dinner, which they found rather disconcerting, in the modern dining room of her third floor flat, where a wire-haired terrier sat on the hearthrug like a modern statue, its sculptured legs and well-trimmed whiskers unbelievably straight and clean.
‘That’s my Totty,’ she said. ‘His kennel name is Moses Tutankhamun the Third, if you ever heard of anything so ridiculous. So I call him Totty.’
She also fed him tit-bits from her plate, and when dinner was over, they all had to take him upstairs onto the roof of the flats ‘for a breath of fresh air’.
It was extraordinary up on the roof, for being a modern construction the entire area was as flat as a school playground. It had been roofed over by a dome made of thin wire mesh, presumably to prevent the playing children from falling over the edge, and there were garden seats set beside the chimneys and the water tower. They had a spectacular view south across the tree-lined streets of South Croydon and all the way to the hills and woods and green fields of Purley and Addiscombe. They could even see the north downs in the distance, humped like pale blue whales.
‘Gosh!’ Megan said. ‘What a view!’
‘Come over the other side,’ Claire suggested. ‘It’s even better there.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us you was one of the idle rich?’ Jim hissed at Froggy, once his sister was on the other side of the roof and out of earshot.
‘Nobody asked me, Sir, she said,’ Froggy grinned.
‘That’s torn it,’ Peggy said, teasing Jim. ‘What you going to do now, Mr working-class Boxall?’
‘I shall give it serious thought,’ Jim said. ‘I take a dim view of this you know, Froggy.’
‘Does he see everything in class terms?’ Froggy asked Peggy, laughing at his friend.
She could see that the question had irritated Jim and she was afraid that she might have annoyed him too by calling him working-class like that, so she thought for a few seconds, trying to find something soothing to say.
‘Not everything,’ Jim answered for her. ‘Only politics, religion, education, economics, war. Trivial things like that.’
‘Well of course. You’d be asking for trouble if you married out of your class.’
‘He’s a Puritan,’ Froggy said to Peggy. ‘You’ll have to watch that.’
‘But Peggy was watching the sky. ‘What’s that?’ she said.
‘What’s what?’ Jim asked looking up too. ‘Hey, Froggy. Look at that!’
There was a squadron of planes flying in formation above the Anerley Hills, unfamiliar dark planes trailing white con trails. They could hear the laboured droning of their engines in the distance.
‘D’you recognize them?’ Froggy asked.
But before Jim could answer him the planes were recognized in a most specific way. They could hear the pounding of anti-aircraft fire and shell bursts began to open like surrealistic black roses in the blue sky beside the planes.
‘They’re Jerries!’ Jim shouted. ‘They’re Jerries.’
And on a bombing raid too, forming a line ready to attack, making shallow dives one after the other as the shells burst all around them. Now there were plumes of black smoke rising from the ground after every dive and they could hear the crump of the explosions.
‘Where is it?’ Megan said breathlessly, running to join them and standing close to Peggy.
‘Croydon Airport, I’ll bet,’ Froggy said. ‘They’re bombing the airport.’
There was something unreal about it, as if they were watching a film, only a film in natural colour instead of black and white, for now there were flames among the smoke.
And then as suddenly as it had begun, the raid was over. The planes regrouped and flew back the way they’d come, climbing into the blue, leaving their white trails behind them, as innocent as lambs’ tails. And the smoke of the anti-aircraft fire dispersed too, elongating into grey wisps, and finally vanishing like the planes.
‘Good God, Bertie,’ Claire said to her brother. ‘We’ve seen an air raid.’
In the shock of the moment none of them registered that Froggy’s name was Bertie.
‘Why didn’t somebody sound the sirens?’ Peggy asked.
As if in answer to her question the sirens began to wail.
‘Bit late now,’ Froggy said.
‘Perhaps it’s another lot,’ Claire said, squinting up at the sky. ‘Should we go down to the shelter, do you think?’
‘If it’s another lot we shall see them coming from up here,’ Froggy told her. ‘We’ll give them a quarter of an hour and see what happens.’
So they waited in a rather eerie silence, staring out across the peaceful countryside. War had come to London at last, but none of them could take it in. That’s what it’s like to be bombed Peggy was thinking, planes diving and guns firing and earth thrown up hundreds of feet into the air, but it was still unreal. They’re bombing airfields, Jim was reasoning, so it’ll be our turn sooner or later. And the thought was still casting a chill into his mind when the all clear went.
‘Let’s go dancing,’ he said. They needed to enjoy themselves, to feel alive and full of energy, to put as much pleasure as they could between themselves and the bombs that were going to fall. ‘Where’s the nearest palais, Froggy?’
So Claire telephoned her young man and told him to meet them in the Lido and they all went dancing. And a high old time they had, stumbling and giggling through waltzes and quicksteps and even attempting foxtrots for once although they didn’t know the steps. But the floor was so crowded and there was such an electric excitement in the place that nobody minded what sort of dance they were doing. And at the end of the evening when they’d smooched the last waltz with the lights romantically dimmed and their faces spangled by the dazzle of the spinning chandelier, Froggy said he’d come back to Greenwich with them so that he could see Megan to her door.
‘Well ta,’ Megan said, ‘but there’s no need really. I can go with Jim and Peggy.’
‘Oh reason not the need,’ he said in a voice that showed he was quoting from something. ‘Don’t argue. I’m coming with you.’
And did.
Jim was pleased. ‘Gives us more time on our own,’ he said to Peggy as they stopped to kiss in the darkness. ‘Cook me breakfast tomorrow?’
‘Can’t you cook your own breakfast yet?’ she teased.
‘Yes, OK. Breakfast I can manage on my own,’ he said, teasing back. ‘But there are other things, now our Lily’s got a job.’
Lily had followed Joan’s example, and after arranging for Percy to be looked after during the day by his grandmother in the new council flats round the corner, she’d taken a job in the local munitions factory. So the house was conveniently empty.
They cooked a leisurely breakfast of Peggy’s potato cakes and one precious rasher of bacon each and they read the morning paper, which reported ‘Germans raid airfields. 71 German planes shot down,’ and then since they were still officially on holiday from this war, they went to bed, to the sharpest and most prolonged pleasure they had ever known. It was as if their unexpected preview of the battles to come had sharpened their capacity for delight.
Afterwards as they were sharing his last cigarette Peggy looked around at the little room as if she was seeing it for the first time, at his books ranged so neatly against the walls, at the gaudy stripes of all those Penguins, blue and white, and orange and white, and the green spines of the history books, at the pale curtains and the striped bedspread and the sunshine shadowing the wall with the long barred pattern of the window frames. How extraordinary that she’d never noticed that before. Nor how green the little garden was beyond the window.
‘Let’s go up the Park,’ she said.
So they walked in Greenwich Park, arm in arm among sweet chestnut trees heavy with white blossom like carved candles, over grass more green and luscious than she’d ever seen it and speckled all over with a rich pattern of white daisies and glistening buttercups. Below them the colonnades of the Naval Hospital shone white against the blue sky and the Thames was blue too, sky-blue and olive-green, the colours shifting and changing as she watched, and shimmering with sharp points of diamond-white light.
‘Do you remember that day at Brighton?’ she said.
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ he answered, smiling as he remembered. ‘As a moat defensive to a house.’
‘Will it keep them out?’
‘If the Channel’s rough enough, and we have command of the air.’
‘Which is why they were bombing airfields yesterday.’
‘Yes.’
They’ll bomb Hornchurch, she thought. Hornchurch and all the other airfields round about. And London. But she didn’t say anything because there wasn’t any need to put it into words. He knew all that as well as she did. Probably better.
He was lighting two cigarettes, concentrating on the flame of the match.
‘Tabby eyes,’ he said, handing hers across to her.
‘Jim?’
‘I’ve got my props.’
‘I noticed.’
‘We did say we’d get married when I was an LAC.’
‘We can’t though, can we,’ she said, exhaling a long column of smoke. ‘Not now. I couldn’t leave London now, could I? Not with air raids coming.’ Their surreptitious love-making still filled her with guilt, especially afterwards, but guilt was preferable to running away from her city just when she was most needed there.
He recognized the truth of what she was saying even though it upset him to hear it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose not.’ He didn’t want her to stay in London. She might be injured when the Germans started bombing. She might get killed. And that thought was so terrible that it made him grit his teeth.
She saw the tell-tale movement of his jaw and understood it. ‘We’ve got a job to do,’ she said sensibly. ‘Both of us. Me in London. You in the RAF.’ It was better just to get on with it and not to think about what might happen.
But they both thought about what might happen as they kissed goodbye later that day, standing at the station with his arms round her waist, gazing at one another without words but with a new anguished intensity as if they were trying to print the memory of what they saw deep deep in their minds. Just in case.
And as the train finally pulled their hands apart, they both said the same thing in the same voice. ‘Take care of yourself.’
He worried about her all the way back to Hornchurch, and dreamed about her all night, but the minute he stepped into the hangars the next morning the war engulfed him to the exclusion of everything else. There had been a raid the previous afternoon and the ground crews were still picking up the pieces. The hangars were full of aircraft under repair. There was no time for the formality of greeting, just a job to be done and as quickly as they could do it.
‘When do they want ’em?’ Jim asked as he worked.
‘Yesterday.’
‘Bad show yesterday,’ his oppos told him in the laconic shorthand of their RAF slang. ‘Jerry had a field day. Two of our kites pranged.’
‘Whose?’
The casualties were named in the same unemotional style. It was easier to say that someone you knew had ‘bought it’ rather than use the awful word ‘killed’. But it was death just the same however you spoke of it.
They worked at speed, stripping down raddled engines, repairing bullet holes, replacing parts wrecked beyond repair, swearing as they got in one another’s way. Nobody needed to tell them how urgent it was.
In mid-afternoon their own squadron was scrambled to intercept a wave of incoming raiders, and when the planes returned and the ground crews went out to service, refuel and rearm them, Jim saw for the first time what air battles could do to planes and pilots.
There were three Spitfires in his flight and the first two landed safely, both planes unharmed, both pilots laconic with triumph, but the third returned with its undercarriage shot away and had to make a crash landing. The fire tender and the ambulance raced alongside the runway to keep pace with his descent, but the ground crews could only stand by in anguished impotence and watch as the torn plane dropped on its belly, bounced, skidded, one wing ripping against the runway, crumpling like paper and hissing sparks, slowed, skewed and finally stopped without bursting into flames and with the ambulance a few feet away from the nose cone. So far, so good, but they all knew they only had a few seconds to get the pilot clear and douse the plane before it became an inferno, and those few seconds were even more anguished than the landing had been. But the fire tender was beside the plane, hosing it with foam, the pilot was being hauled out of the cockpit. They’d made it.
He was very badly injured, his flying jacket wet with blood and his young face seamed with sweat and dirt and completely colourless. As the ambulance crew eased him onto their stretcher and his blood dripped onto the tarmac he opened his eyes, tried to smile and said, ‘I bagged the bugger. Tell the CO.’
The heroism of his return fired the entire squadron. It amazed Jim to realize that he felt an almost paternal protectiveness for ‘his’ pilots now. Until the battle began he’d looked on them as men apart, admiring their flying skills, who wouldn’t? but irritated by the upper-class ease of those drawling voices, and the arrogance that allowed them to swan through every regulation.
Now, as the German attack continued and more and more sorties were flown, the arrogance became something entirely admirable, a superb, understated courage that played down fear, made light of injuries, dared death. Now nothing was too good for these men or their planes. The ground crews worked unstintingly, by day and night, snatching sleep when they could, aware, tired though they were, that a mistake could cost one of their pilots his life. And the pilots flew more sorties than anyone had ever thought possible. And still the Germans came.
After a week of it, days and nights began to merge into one another. They lost count of time. There was nothing except this daily, exhausting battle in the air. Sometimes they only had thirty-five minutes to service, refuel and rearm the planes before their pilots strode out to take them up again. It was a scramble in every sense of the word.
And a scramble that was watched with admiration and anxiety by everyone in England because so much hinged on the outcome. If the RAF were defeated and the weather and the tides were right, Hitler would invade. His invasion barges were waiting on the other side of the Channel from Flushing to the Pas de Calais. So the BBC bulletins spread news of the air battles in their phlegmatic British way, and the newspapers reported ‘The Battle of Britain’ in admiring detail, and in London, newspaper sellers wrote their placards with perky humour as though they were reporting a cricket match. ‘RAF versus Luftwaffe. Today’s losses. Germany 98, England 13.’
And all over South London people watched the skies as the dog-fights roared above them, following the swirling con trails of the embattled planes as they drew paisley patterns in the summer sky, and taking shelter when the bombers were overhead. Sometimes there were as many as four alerts in a day and they heard the crump of a distant explosion and the pounding of anti-aircraft fire all around them and once a Messerschmitt roared out of the sky in flames and exploded in a garden over in Plumstead. But there were no bombs dropped in Peggy’s corner of Greenwich and although she was on duty and heard plenty of stories about ‘incidents’ elsewhere there were no local incidents for her to attend. Sometimes as the sirens wailed their alarm she wondered how she would behave when she saw her first bomb victim, and sent up a silent prayer that she wouldn’t fail. But it was the airfields that were being attacked and the airfields that were being bombed and that made her worry for Jim’s safety.
Halfway through the month his squadron was moved back to Catterick, ostensibly for a period of rest, but Catterick was under fire too and they flew almost as many sorties there as they’d done in the south. They returned to Hornchurch after a fortnight almost as fatigued as they’d been when they left the place and there was more work to do than ever.
The day after their return was warm and sunny with a light, southerly breeze, a perfect day for opps, but unfortunately as perfect for the Luftwaffe as it was for the RAF. The klaxons sounded half-way through the afternoon when Jim and his team were half-way through a difficult repair.
‘We’ll finish it later,’ the Flight Sergeant said. ‘Take cover.’
There was a sandbagged trench alongside the hangar within easy running distance but the raiders were overhead before they reached it. Nine Dorniers loosening out from a V formation, the first on its bombing run fifty feet above the hangars. The gunners let fly with everything they had, but they didn’t have much, Bofors, three-inch heavies, machine guns left over from the First World War. Two Hurricanes were in pursuit. They could hear the tracers, and the scream of their engines as they pulled out of a dive.
And then the first bomb exploded on the runway, shaking the ground under their feet and lifting so much earth into the air that for a few seconds they couldn’t see anything at all in a darkness of dirt and dust. The second bomb hit a hangar, scattering pieces in all directions. Then there were long minutes of confusion, engines roaring, a plane screaming to earth, gunfire, explosions, the rattle of falling debris, as they crouched behind the sandbags and the attack went on, for ever and for no time at all.
And then the planes were roaring off again and they were scrambling out of the trench, legs shaking, and running to the hangars, moving like automata without any sense of being in control of their movements.
There were about ten craters on the runway, one of the hangars was completely gone, there was debris everywhere, shattered planks and bits of paper and torn pieces of corrugated iron, and over by the mess hut there were several large joints of meat scattered on the ground, wrapped in bits of air force uniform.
Jim was inside the hangar before he realized that what he’d just seen were the remains of a man. Dear God. The remains of a man scattered like joints of meat. Nausea rose into his throat and for a few seconds he stood still, swallowing and trembling. The remains of a man.
This is war, he thought. This is what war means. If they can do this to an air field they could flatten Paradise Row. They could flatten Paradise Row and kill everyone in it. And hard on that thought came resolution. We’ve got to beat them. No matter what any of us have to endure we’ve got to stop them.