The middle of August, and hell raining down upon them. Messerschmitts, their windows mirrored with morning light, the scream of engine and machine gun, and everywhere the puffs of bullets slamming into earth. The incandescent glow of a Spitfire laced by a German gunner, and men screaming.
Alec presses his face to the earth in a ditch beneath what’s left of an apple tree, his heart thundering in his chest. Manston is too close to the coast, too close to the Thames estuary. The Me 109s, when they turn back for home, have to dump their bombs somewhere—a lighter, swifter plane is better when you’re trying to get back to the Continent. And Manston is an incredible target—all those planes on the airfield, runways pocked with craters from other, earlier raids, a few score airmen and their ground support, and all of them scared. They pretend that the fear makes them stronger, and maybe that’s true, although it sometimes seems to Alec quite the opposite, in moments like this, when the sound of shelling sends them into ditches. But mostly the fear holds them in place, clinging to their duty as if it might save their lives. Alec has never asked why the RAF keep the station open—all the men know it’s too close, too dangerous, but Whitehall want them there. Scapegoats, one man says. A diversion, says another.
He has been with No. 600 Squadron since the war started, straight out of the University Squadron at Cambridge. It’s a reserve unit, all volunteer in theory, but reserve and volunteer mean something different now than they did when the war was new. Conscription is now a fact of life, and he’d rather be here than in the army. Flying is an endless source of amazement—the sounds and smells, the banging of the engine into the night and the scrape of wind across his propellers . . . Flight is the best thing that’s ever happened to him, except for June. For so long he’d thought he might go back and join Roger in the Guides, but this . . . He belongs in the air, and in any case the cavalry is changing—a recent letter from Roger laments the shift from proper horses to tanks and lorries. Alec can’t imagine going to war in something like that, not when he can be up here where the air courses like a river around his plane. Every day he thinks about what his life will be like after the war, about staying in the RAF and making a career of it. Perhaps finding his way to the bases at Peshawar or Agra, and flying over India. And every day he wonders what June would think of a life at the Frontier. Likely enough she knows already what flying means to him, how it makes the sinews of his chest thrum. She has always been the smart one. The smart one, the beautiful one, the best one. He knows how lucky he is.
Another Messerschmitt buzzes overhead, much too close, and Alec tries to make himself smaller and less visible. What he wants most is to leap into his plane and wield the power to drive the Germans away from Manston. Instead, he lies as still as he can, stranded like a fledgling on the ground, breathing in the cordite and sweat.
No. 600 Squadron shares the broken runway with a squadron of Spitfires. Their own Bristol Blenheims are faster than they look, but crowded, the fuselage cramped with three of them in there. He can’t always see what he’s doing when he comes in for a landing. Too, the Blenheims are unwieldy in the daytime, and most of their missions are night fighter engagements now. At night the sounds of engine and gun seem to echo back from the moon and stars, though he knows it isn’t true.
Alec loves being part of something larger, the reciprocal reliance each pilot has on his crew and on the other pilots. He loves his squadron, despite its inherently transient nature and the endless grief that they never have time to process. The men who were here when he joined it have mostly shifted or transferred or died. Even their leaders are changing. Jimmy Wells was his first CO, and he’s been gone since early summer, when a training accident killed him. Nothing is ever the same; nobody is ever the same. The men who don’t vanish aren’t the same either, especially after two months of Manston, under constant fire. Alec sleeps when he can, plays card games like whist and clagg in the mess with the other airmen, all of them always ready to scramble into the gloaming.
Around him, bullets whine and skip. The ditch feels like a long stripe of target carved out of the earth, but he’s not sure anywhere else would be better. They have learned these last weeks that there is not much in the way of shelter at Manston. The endless raids have taught them that much.
A plane banks in the sky, and he tilts his head, listening to the pull of metal and flaps against gravity. He glances up—one of the German planes is hit, spiraling into the fields a mile or so hence, and the rest seem to be retreating, a group of Spitfires at their heels. Good, he thinks. If the Germans are clearing off, that’s one more attack he’s survived, which feels like one step closer to being with June again.
He remembers her face when he told her he’d joined the reserves, the way pride and worry had filled her eyes. And again, on that last day before they’d parted, that Sunday in London, nearly a year ago. Everyone knew war would be declared; Hitler had refused all entreaties; it was only a matter of time. And so Alec had gone to London, where June was spending a weekend with a girl she’d known at university. Ainsley Finch-Martin’s people had money and titles, though Ainsley herself was taking nurse’s training at Great Ormond, and Alec had felt just a bit shabby.
The three of them had sat quietly and listened to Chamberlain on the wireless. So that was it, then. War. Nothing was different, and everything. An air raid siren ripped through the morning, and he could nearly feel the tension all over London of people looking at the sky, already tired of waiting. Ainsley made tea, and then they listened to the King’s speech.
After, June pulled him round the corner of the kitchen and kissed his cheek, and they went out into the sunny midday, watching crews of men struggle to get barrage balloons aloft. At Russell Square they sat close together on a bench, watching pigeons. He remembered the way the pigeons had flung themselves into the sky when a troupe of children passed, lined up two by two in a crocodile on their way to Euston or King’s Cross. So quiet, and yet a vibration of panic underneath, all over the city, showing in the cautious evacuations of children, the careful low voices of couples. How many of the pairs he saw were having the same conversation he was having with June?
In the crucible of RAF Manston, he holds tight to the knowledge, as sure as breath, that she is his, and he hers. At the end of that day in London there had been the press of time, and the press of greed for June’s touch. It would be months before they saw each other again, perhaps longer. After their tea he had taken her back to the house in Bloomsbury, both of them knowing that he would be back in his airplane the next day. Both of them knowing the war was not going to be over by Christmas, whatever the optimists and idealists said. So she had led him into her room and quietly closed the door, and they had let the hunger speak for them.
Months later, and it feels like the war will never end. Alec lifts his head; the Germans have gone, for now. They’ll be back in a day or two. Or tomorrow. Or that evening. Or never.
Somewhere a man is crying, his sobs like the lowing of a cow.
A letter comes from June—a friend of her father’s has recommended her to the Foreign Office, and she is excited to be doing her part at last, spurred on like so many others by Dunkirk, which feels equally like catastrophe and miracle. Alec’s chest fills with ice; London is a target, and much less safe than the Fens. He writes back and tells her to be careful; he is more afraid of losing June than he is of the Germans. There is so much more he wants to say, but he doesn’t know how, and he can’t bear the idea of being clumsy with her when they are so far apart, a war and what sometimes seems like half the world between them. So he tells her he loves her. He tells her to come back to him. Once upon a time there was a river, he writes, emptying his heart onto the page, and on that river lived a bear . . . It is the best he can do, and the least.
The squadron moves from base to base. In the nights, settled into the tight pilot’s seat of the Blenheim, Alec narrows his eyes against the horizon, scanning for the blurry shadows and tracer fire that signify enemy aircraft. He flies his sorties over the Channel and the North Sea, his mouth watering with a confused, queasy, iron-flavored triumph when he shoots down his first German plane. Later he’ll dream of that night, of climbing out of the clouds and finding himself in the middle of a squadron of Luftwaffe planes, the inventive cursing of his gunner, the German rounds screaming past his small windscreen, the howling of his guns. Back at base the ground crew paint a tiny swastika on the nose of the Blenheim to mark the kill. Another night, bolstered by the new Mk III radar, he and his crew shoot down a Dornier bomber in tandem with another Blenheim. He watches the bomber plunge into the darkness below, smoke boiling out of the fuselage. Another kill mark goes up on the nose.
When they’re not flying, they’re still together. Three men, one airplane, one crew. Alec wishes the war would end, but he loves these men. He and Tim Yates, his bombardier and navigator, and Cobber Willis, his gunner, are as close as any other crew—and lucky, besides, to still be together. Lucky not to have to replace one man with someone new—even though every set of men stops being individuals at some point and becomes the mission. They drink together, catch sleep when they can, scramble when the alarm sends them to the sky. They look for German planes, shoot at them, try not to be shot at themselves.
He doesn’t realize how far into his routine he’s settled until a new pilot joins the squadron—Sanjay Kichlu, one of a score of Indian Air Force veterans who have come to England to join the RAF and fight the Germans. It’s not long before Alec discovers that Sanjay, only a year or two older than he is, has been to many of the same parts of Kashmir and the hill country. When they’re not in the air, they talk about tigers and snow, drinking too much of the strong milky tea in the station’s canteen.
The war in the air rages into the autumn. Alec doesn’t know until later how outnumbered the RAF pilots were, how heavily stacked against them it all was. He’s glad, when he finds out, that he hadn’t known. Doing the impossible is easier when you don’t know. But with Hitler’s efforts to quash the RAF and commence with invasion thwarted, the focus shifts. The Luftwaffe is bombing cities now and shows no signs of stopping. Dispatches from London are weirdly calm, describing unthinkable chaos, bombs and ordnance raining down every night, rumors of Londoners sleeping in Tube stations. Often, in the half-awake dimness of waiting, he daydreams of going to the city and taking June away to somewhere as beautiful and safe as the summer meadows of Kashmir.
Meanwhile, 600 Squadron flies south and engages Stukas and German bombers over farmland that used to be quiet. It’s still busy with cows; England is always England. Once, flying too low over a pasture, Alec looks out and sees a boy waving to him, what looks like a map trailing out of his hand. He must be a spotter, official or otherwise. When he was a boy, if a Blenheim or Spitfire had cruised overhead, he would have stopped in his tracks too, to wave at the pilot.
In early October he and his crew take the Blenheim out from Yorkshire over the North Sea. It’s foggy and dank on the ground, and worse in the air. He wants to climb through the clouds and into the open night. Look for the dark spaces where the stars don’t show—the negative space of an enemy plane. The stars are still what’s true, just as they were aboard the RMS Jaipur. Every man who flies at night knows this, but nobody trusts it like Alec. The other airmen call him Cosmo because he’s always cataloging stars.
This time the clouds don’t end when he thinks they’re going to. He emerges into the clear of night, and as he registers the dark blotch ahead of him as a plane, that pilot sees him as well and the darkness erupts into the noise and light of battle.
He doesn’t know how bad it is until he realizes Cobber has stopped swearing. There’s too much wind in the fuselage. Tim is crying. Alec tries to see over his shoulder, but all he can make out is his bombardier’s outline in the cockpit lights.
“Jerry’s having his way with me,” Tim says, the words bitten off with pain. “Can you land us?”
Alec has no idea. He needs his navigator to creep farther back into the plane and see what’s happened, what he’s working with. But there’s no time, and Tim is wounded. He’s reasonably certain Cobber is dead. And if he can’t bring the plane in right, he and Tim will be, too. The Blenheim is fighting him, the Germans are still shooting at him, and he can’t shoot back.
“Perhaps!” Alec bellows through the noise of the wind shrieking through the fuselage. He wishes he sounded more confident.
Tim, still crying, makes something like a laugh. “Well, Cosmo, try not to cock it up.”
Alec clings to the yoke all the way down, but the plane comes in too hard, the landing strip screaming past at the wrong angle. His thoughts and his heart race, a chorus of fear almost beyond words. Some part of his mind notes how long each second lasts, time slowing as the crash speeds up. I’m sorry, June, he thinks. I’m so sorry. It’s impossible to know what is earth and what is sky until a blur of shadow crisps into the corona of a massive old oak. Then there is the rending of metal as his Blenheim shears branches into nothing. And finally the fearful miasma of smoke and petrol, the plane crushing sidelong against an old stone wall.
Something is wrong in his belly, where the twist of the plane has jammed him into the useless yoke. He pries himself loose, breathless with pain in his front, everywhere, blood seeping into his eyes. His left arm hangs crooked, but he makes himself focus and turns to examine the wreckage. He’s right about Cobber, caught in the chest with a German round and slumped into his harness. It’s not his fault, he knows that, but still a wave of guilt-laced despair surges over him. Then Tim groans, and Alec pulls himself together. He leans into the ruined cockpit and helps Tim out, dragging him one-armed away from the chaos, trying not to make worse the piece of shrapnel lodged in Tim’s thigh. In the near distance, an ambulance races across the fields with its lights and bells on, coming for them. Alec closes his eyes.
They keep him in the infirmary until he stops pissing blood and his ribs and shoulder start to heal, although he’s not nearly ready yet to be airborne again. He’s lucky, more or less, although it will be a while before the bruising goes away. Tim is healing, too—it’s the kind of wound that during a quieter time could get a man sent home, but not here, and not now.
Alec waits anxiously to be cleared. After they let him out of the infirmary, he stares at the sky, plucking at his sling, longing to be airborne. When Sanjay isn’t flying, they play cards and talk about Kashmir, and when he is, Alec haunts the Ops Room. He likes it there, the sunken floor in the center the microcosm of their world. Everything has its place in here, from the Perspex situation boards to the heavy doors that lead out toward the mess and the barracks. Even when they scramble, their CO keeps the Ops Room orderly.
One afternoon at the end of November, finally cleared for flight, the world outside full of sleet and an icy fog, Alec’s standing in the Ops Room with Sanjay, waiting for the CO to finish up a briefing so he can ask for a flight assignment, wondering if the old man’s going to make him beg, when the door bangs open and a half-familiar voice interrupts, “Beg pardon, gents, I’m looking for Squadron Leader Maxwell.”
Everyone in the room turns to look at the newcomer, wondering what kind of man makes a point of such an entrance. But Alec, trying to pin down the combination of tone and carriage echoing in his memory, already knows—he’d thought he’d never see any of the boys from the RMS Jaipur again, but here is Charlie, taking charge just as he always had.
By the end of the week, Flight Lieutenant Charlie Pascoe has made himself entirely at home with the squadron. He’s an ace already, and his Beaufighter, a faster, heavier plane that has already replaced the Blenheims of other squadrons, is scarred and battered. He and Alec pick up more or less where they left off. But Alec was eight then; the age difference between them is no longer a matter of awe for him. It’s not long before Alec knows that if he’s looking for Charlie, he’s probably standing out on the airfield running his hands along the fuselage of his plane, climbing up and down the wings like he used to climb the massive shipping crates in the cargo hold.
Wiltshire, spring. The squadron has moved to RAF Colerne, and Alec wants to be thinking about the new grasses on the Downs, the curl of moss and liverworts on coppice stools. He wants to have a picnic with June, someplace quiet where it’s just the two of them. He wants to kiss her until he’s dizzy. Until they both are. Sometimes, if he’s not careful, he can get lost in thinking of kissing her, of the way her mouth is so gentle it makes him want to cry. She is so capable and so strong, but her tenderness nests in the lining of his heart and won’t let go.
But the Germans take most of his attention, flying massive raids every night. From the Downs nearby they can see the bombing of Bristol, and the fluid silver-white trails the dogfights paint in the sky. The news from London, Coventry . . . anywhere, really. Buckingham Palace has been hit, St. Paul’s nearly destroyed again and again by fire, cities everywhere in ruins, uncountable dead.
The barracks at the base are worse even than Manston, but once a week a Bedford truck takes them into Bath. Alec looks forward to the brass railing under his palm, leading him smoothly into the sunken bath and the hot water. A brass rail means another week of staying whole. They have twenty-four-hour passes sometimes too, leave to go into Bath and have a drink, sit back with Sanjay or Tim and watch Charlie talk to girls, be something other than a man trying not to think of the odds.
Along with the base, the planes have changed. He hasn’t been in a Blenheim since the crash landing in Yorkshire. He’d been lucky not to kill them all; the loss of Cobber was a heavy enough weight on him. But a crate is a crate, and crashing one has not made him fear them. When he’s assigned one of the new Beaufighters and takes her up, he finds that flying, at least, has not changed. He loves the air, loves the sway and pull of thermals against the wings and rudder, and the chatter of the Beau’s engines.
In the tail end of spring, a letter comes from June—can he meet her in London? Alec’s heart actually leaps—he can feel it ricocheting off his ribs. It’s been too long since he’s seen her, too long since her voice has soothed him. She is a better correspondent than he is, her letters arriving relatively often, and the request for a rendezvous sends a frisson of delight through him—their leaves have not coincided, and so he has seen her only once in the nearly two years of war. But presumably June is as lonely as he is. He clears a day with the group captain and writes her back, his hand shaking almost too much to get the information down. Yes, of course, yes, a thousand times yes.
Two days later he’s sitting beneath the wing of his Beaufighter, turning his mother’s ring in his fingers, when Charlie finds him.
“Nice, that,” Charlie says, gesturing at the ring. “You making a plan for your girl?”
Alec nods, his nerves sparking like flints with anticipation and anxiety. But at least the tension of waiting for a courier to fetch the ring from Fenbourne, where Alec’s most prized belongings wait for him in his upstairs bedroom, has passed. “You think she’ll like it?”
Charlie chuckles. “May I?” He reaches down at Alec’s quiet yes and carefully takes the ring, holding it up to the soft morning light. The diamond flashes out pale yellow, and Alec blinks, taken back for a moment to watching his mother’s hands sparkle in the thick Indian sunlight a lifetime ago.
“Not as heavy as it looks,” Charlie says. “And I rather like that claw thing holding the stone. Reminds me of a lion, or a leopard.” He tilts the bright gold to look at the inside of the band. Alec watches the bounce of light. He’s memorized the jeweler’s marks long ago—the crown insignia, the 18, the tiny worn swirl of his mother’s initials.
“I’ve known June nearly my whole life,” Alec says, taking the ring back and slipping it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “I want her in the rest of it as well.”
Charlie tilts his head in acknowledgment; he’s heard more stories of June than anyone. “I daresay she’ll like it,” he says. “Lovely old piece like that.”
Alec smiles. He always has the dull ache of missing June juxtaposed against the bright shimmer of loving her, and today is no different. The ring and the aspirations it contains add a layer of feeling, but the foundation—the wanting, the shivery memory of her touch, the quiet knowledge of having a place—is no different at all.
He looks up at Charlie. “This time tomorrow she will have said one way or another.”
“You’ll do fine,” Charlie says. He puts out a hand and Alec takes it and Charlie hauls him to his feet. “You’ll do fine.”
The next day finds him on an early-morning train to Paddington. He can’t stop patting his pocket to check on the ring. He fidgets all the way to London, trying to read the paper and failing. All he can think about is June. Will it be different, being engaged as opposed to merely having an understanding? He knows they are meant for each other, that their union is inevitable, but the idea of her wearing his mother’s ring, of the way her hand will feel against his cheek with that ring on it, tolls like the bells of St. Anne’s for Christmas services in Fenbourne. The idea feels like home.