15

“Where did Trixie say he came from?”

“New Haven.”

“No, over here,” I say. “Which U.S. base?”

“Oh. Halesworth.”

“Yes, Halesworth. Would it be much off our route?”

He looks it up in the guidebook. “Airfield built in 1942—43, intended as a bomber station,” he reads. “Only eight miles from Suffolk coast. Ideally placed for escort fighter operations.”

“Why?”

“Range, I suppose.”

As we approach Holton, the village near which the base was built (two miles out of Halesworth), I find it a moving experience to be driving through this flat East-Anglian countryside where so many of my compatriots served during the war. I think of all those young men who flew up into the skies nearly half a century ago, so many of them never to return.

“But please don’t imagine you’re going to absorb the flavour of an airfield,” warns Tom. “I gather that most of the land has gone back to agriculture, that a good portion’s now given over to turkey farming.”

We discover there’s one small omission in the guidebook. Part of the perimeter has provided the council with a special course for novice lorry drivers.

And, yes, of course it’s sentimental, but there’s somehow a sadness in seeing the destruction of any place where life’s been lived intensely. It’s possibly worse when you can still distinguish outlines. An employee of the turkey farm, a stocky and grizzled man with bow legs, leads us to those spots where the main runway would have been and the control tower and the hangars.

“Two thousand yards long,” he says, pointing to the runway—you can just make out the traces. “And then, of course, the Nissen huts…funny to remember there was accommodation here for some three thousand.”

He’s made quite a study of it, points out where the T2 hangars would have been. “Did you know Glen Miller came to Halesworth? 6^th August 1944. A Sunday. But a busy day for Major Miller: Boxted before he came on here.”

We’re standing maybe at the very point where he’d played. It isn’t hard, for a moment, to hear ‘Moonlight Serenade’ or ‘String of Pearls’ flooding that main hangar, drifting out across the airfield.

But then you remember that you’re now on a turkey farm and that facing you is a pool of evil-smelling effluent.

We leave the hangar site and start walking towards what was once the Admin block—though, frankly, I’ve lost interest. The sooner we return to London the better. I make a last attempt to feel my way into my father’s shoes…this stranger’s shoes; to experience one fleeting second of what he himself may have experienced. I close my eyes and try to will something to come to me out of the past. But no. Nothing. I open them and find I’ve walked on some wallflowers. Wild—incongruous—defiant: even in competition with the effluent they give off a warm and spicy smell. I meet Tom’s amused, inquiring glance and shrug self-mockingly. “Okay, you’re right. I should have had more sense. But I bet you anything he brought her here at some point. And probably to hear Glen Miller.” Unexpectedly, the notion gives me pleasure.

At some point as we’re driving back to London I think about the half-brother I have never met. I wonder which side of the Atlantic he may now be roaming.