19

In the first nine months of the war, until the beginning of May 1940, I notched up only eleven sorties against the enemy. After the German invasion of France and the Low Countries I was posted to 148 Squad­ron, which until recently had been operating the obsolete Fairey Battle in France, with horrific losses of both men and machines. Now back in the UK, based at Tealby Moor, the squadron itself was being re-manned and re-equipped, this time with the Wel­lington night bomber. Although the summer of 1940 was a period­ of maximum danger for Britain, the squadron had been pulled back from the front line while the process of reconstruction went on. Everyone was anxious to do what we could, to give back to the Germans what we were taking from them, but for several weeks the squadron to which I was attached did not even have aircraft to fly.

At the beginning of August, when I was going through a dull refresher course on night-time navigation, I received a letter from Birgit.

The last time I had seen her was during the disastrous family reunion the previous Christmas, during which she hardly spoke to me or even looked in my direction. After that I had not expected to hear from her again, although I had in fact received an earlier letter from her, back in May. It was a short, semi-formal note telling me that Joe had been beaten up by some off-duty squaddies. They ap­par­ently took exception to his not being in uniform. That at least was how my mother described it when I phoned her to find out more. She told me that Joe was not badly hurt and that after a short spell in hospital he would be back to normal.

But now Birgit had written to me again. When her letter was brought round during the daily distribution at the airfield, she was so far from my thoughts that I did not recognize her handwriting on the envelope.

The letter was short and written in her plain, almost formal English. I could sense her straining to write carefully and correctly to me. Without explaining why she had decided to write at that particular moment, she told me the circumstances of her present life. She said she had not heard from her parents for more than three years and feared they were dead. She was trying to find out what might have happened to them, but the war made communications with Europe almost impossible. A problem that seemed to her connected was that she was in danger of being interned by the British authorities, as she was known to have been born in Germany. She had already been visited twice by the police but on both occasions Joe had persuaded them to let her stay at home. Now there was a new danger: she said that Joe had been sent to London to work for the Red Cross and he was therefore away for weeks on end. Travel was so difficult with all the fears of invasion, the defensive preparations going on, that he had been home for only one weekend since he left. Being alone terrified her, but because of everything else that had happened she felt especially vulnerable.

That was all her letter said: she made no requests, no suggestions, asked for no help.

It threw me into an emotional quandary. I was living with the idea of her marriage to Joe by ignoring it. The latest row between Joe and me made that easier, of course. Because Birgit did not inter­vene at the time, and because she was after all his wife, I assumed she was allied with him on whatever it was, whatever new thing we rowed about that evening. She was still Birgit, though. Now she was in her early twenties, Birgit, as I witnessed from a distance during the Christmas reunion, had matured both physically and emotion­ally. The slightest thought of her would tip me into a long reverie about what might have been had events worked out differently.

Now I had a whole letter from her.

I wrote back to her the same day. I composed what I intended to be a thoughtful letter, one that was helpful and sympathetic without trying to interfere in any way. At the end I said, as blandly as pos­sible, that if she thought it would help I could probably obtain a short leave and make a hurried trip across to see her.

Two days later I received a one-sentence reply from her: ‘Come as soon as you can.’

I immediately put in an application to the station commander’s office for a forty-eight-hour pass, but at the same time I felt I should take a final precaution against the impulses of the heart. I too wrote a one-sentence letter to her.

‘If I come to visit you,’ I said, ‘am I likely to see my brother Joe?’

She did not reply. As soon as my leave was confirmed I went anyway.