Waiting for a flap. Just stooging around the last couple of days. Pretty uneventful, thank God. I’m feeling bloody tired, though. Everyone is: lounging around in armchairs, dozing behind newspapers. Mathy’s staring at Prideaux’s car, which is still outside the dispersal hut. I saw him kicking the tyres. ‘Can’t somebody move the bloody thing?’ he asks.
Webster puts a hand on his arm.
‘Lay off, Adj.’
The car’s getting on Mathy’s nerves. He keeps on about it, so now it’s getting on everyone else’s nerves as well.
I heard Mathy telling Webster about his sister yesterday. Nobody else was in the mess when he said it, and they thought I was asleep. She died years ago, apparently. A car ran into her. She was only sixteen. Mathy sounded cut up about it, said it should have been him. Older brother and all that, should have protected her. God knows how—the way he told it, he wasn’t even there. She died in hospital, and he was too late to see her. I don’t know why he told Webster that. Interesting, though.
I can hear Gervase pestering Flint, now. He knows he’s not going to get any change out of me. ‘How do you manage to hit anything? I can’t even think, let alone fight.’ Christ Almighty.
Flint shakes his head. ‘Don’t worry about that. You’ll get the hang of it. Watch your tail, watch the sun—always climb towards it—don’t fly straight for more than thirty seconds when you’re in a scrap, because if Jerry gets on your tail, you’re dead. What else? Oh, yes. Stick to Goldilocks like glue, and then you just might have a chance.’
‘What if I lose him?’
‘You find somebody else. Got that?’
‘Yes. But what about shooting?’
‘Don’t bother about deflection or any of that fancy stuff. Your best chance is to get right up his jacksie, and wham! Don’t ponce about taking pot-shots from miles away. Waste of time.’
Flint’s right. We never got taught to shoot, either, apart from taking the odd pop at a drogue, and most of us were just as likely to hit the plane that was towing it. But there’s no point stuffing the new boys’ heads with technical business—they won’t remember it. Up there, it’s all instinct and reflexes. You can’t do it by numbers. Like going in line astern, so you can see bugger all except the plane in front. Waste of time. We just have to make it up as we go along, but it’s no good telling him that. At least it’s Flint he’s bothering this time, and not me. He keeps bleating out questions there’s no answer to. What can we tell him? You can’t prepare someone for combat. You’ve just got to learn to throw the kite about, and hope like hell that when it all starts and you’re scared shitless, you can manage to stop yourself freezing up, or panicking and dashing for cover because you’re so fucking desperate to stay alive. But then, when the urge to chase and kill overrides the fear, it’s the most exciting thing imaginable. And then the first kill—supposing he gets that far—the sheer amazement of watching bits fall off and disintegrate, the plunge down, and then the pleasure, the jubilation, of realising you’ve done it.
The best thing is not to think about it. Better to be too tired, or too pissed, to start taking it too seriously. But that moment: when you’re closing in for the kill, and the Spit’s not even a plane any more, it’s a gun-platform and you’re not even aware that you’re flying it. All this business about pilots being heroes is just a load of cock. Being able to fight and kill is something primitive and fundamental.
Dying’s not so frightening if you’re responsible for your own fate, unlike those poor buggers on the ground, and I don’t think I shall mind, much. I’d never thought of it at all before the war started, couldn’t take it seriously. Still can’t now, that’s the odd thing. Strange how you can be terrified and blasé at the same time, but chaps here manage it all right, that’s something I do know.
No sense wondering who’ll be next—could be me. No reason why it shouldn’t be. That puts the wind up the new ones all right, when one of the experienced pilots goes for a Burton. Some of the new ones won’t last five minutes anyway. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s a particular type—a natural victim, like that tart. You can see it straight off. I don’t know about Sinclair, I just know I don’t want to talk to him. He wants to have it all down pat. Play by the rules. I said to him, ‘There aren’t any rules. There used to be, but there aren’t any more. It’s not a bloody cricket match.’
He blushed like fury, then looked at me all innocent and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, you know.’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘What school you went to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s rot. Schools, who your people are, all of it.’
I said, ‘What do you know about my people?’
‘Nothing. But it doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, bugger off.’
Doesn’t matter. Of course it bloody matters. He went to a decent school, didn’t he?
Like Rodney Bowers. He lived down the road from us, where the good houses were. I can see him now, standing in front of his big, half-timbered house with the neat garden, his trunk in the driveway beside him, waiting to be driven off to school for another term, and me, squatting in the leaf mould, staring through a gap in the hedge at what I wanted—what I should have had—and thinking it should be me, me, not him, but instead I went to the local dump and came back day after day to a cramped, shabby life of putting up and making do and no space or time that wasn’t filled with my stupid, dribbling cretin of a sister, what she needed, what she wanted, so I couldn’t go to a good school or have anything new. And Bowers just took it all for granted, that he should have what I did not, in that easy way those people have as if it’s their birthright, when it should have been mine.
We’d go about together in the holidays, and it was easy to make him do things because he was younger than I was…the two of us in our garden, up a tree, pelting Maisie with apples. She was about sixteen then, a formless, tented lump on the grass, gazing up with eyes like currants folded in dough, twisting her head round, not understanding what we were doing up there, crying when the apples hit their mark and trying to crawl away. When I tired of that, we went down the lane and found a dog turd on the path and I persuaded Bowers to scrape it up on a seaside spade and creep back to the garden and throw it at Maisie over the hedge. She sat there, shrieking, red-faced, with shit in her hair and Mother came out and caught Bowers and marched him back to his house in disgrace and told his mother what he’d done. That got him in trouble, all right. I remember seeing his face, and knowing that he wouldn’t pass the blame to me.
That reminds me: there’s a letter from home in my pocket. It came yesterday, but I forgot about it. I almost threw it away— it’ll only be news of Maisie. Mother wouldn’t write for any other reason, unless it was for money. Either way, I shan’t read it. I’m just surprised she could be bothered at all. One of the first things I can remember her saying to me was, ‘Oh, you won’t have any success in your life.’ Even when I joined the RAF, it just made her angry—she’d said I’d never amount to anything, and I’d proved her wrong. She said it was irresponsible. I might ‘get myself killed’, as she put it, and then who’d look after Maisie when she was gone?
Anyone else would have put her away years ago. I asked Dad once, why they didn’t, and to hear him talk you’d think Mother was some sort of saint. He said it was her life’s work. Not that she ever had any time for him, either.
Maisie can’t even recognise her, that’s the stupid thing. She can’t do anything, except eat. Everything goes in her mouth. Mother was always telling me I was lucky to be so healthy with Maisie like she was. It was just as well. I was always having to do without so she could have some extra treat. Dad didn’t have an overcoat for fifteen years, because of her. Probably what did for him. He should have told her. Letting her walk all over him, her and that great lump, feeding her face, gnawing her knuckles if there wasn’t anything else, and everything her, her, her.
‘We must make sacrifices.’ She liked making sacrifices. Liked being pushed to the side of her own life—made a fetish out of it, and she wanted us the same. She liked going round with her clothes all threadbare, saving money on groceries, cheapest cuts of meat, and always talking about it, drawing attention to it. There was nothing decent in the house. I was ashamed to bring anyone home; school was bad enough. Rushton’s sister’s a loony, that’s what they used to say. And she was always saying, ‘It’s not Maisie’s fault’, as if it was my fault.
One year we had a wasps’ nest at the top of the house. Maisie got stung, and from the way Mother carried on, you’d think she’d been killed. I went up to look at it the next day, and I got stung too, but of course that was my fault and nothing was made of it. Then I heard her tell one of her friends I’d been making up stories and I’d never been stung at all—as if I wasn’t entitled to have anything happen to me, not even a wasp sting.
It was always like that. They never wanted to know anything about me, either of them. Don’t think I’d have existed if it hadn’t been for Maisie. All Mother wanted was someone to help look after her. Even Dad drew the line at that. She was disappointed I wasn’t a girl—that would have been easier. But Dad never stood up for me. Never. ‘You’d better do as she says.’ We should have put it on his headstone.
I used to put flour on Maisie’s face, for powder. Rub it on all over, except round her mouth where she kept licking it off. She’d try to grab the bag and cram all the flour into her mouth but I wouldn’t let her. Then she’d start to scream. Everything in her face would bulge, straining underneath the coating of flour, and the noise… I wanted to stick my compass in her.
Mother always expected me to fetch and carry for her, clean up after her. Great stupid lump. All those years, the dullness of it. It was as if I was standing in a corner, facing the wall, unable to turn round, and the world was a tiny, narrow space, with no interest, no proper life. But when I learned to fly it was as if I was suddenly facing the other way, looking out.
I don’t expect that I shall live long, and the reality is, I don’t want to. I know there won’t be anything for me when this is all over, just a world in which I am always out of step. I’m not going to read this letter. Why should I? I’m throwing it away. I’ll look at the paper, instead. It’s yesterday’s but it’ll do. RAF bag 46 in 5 attacks… Boy, 12, Saved Dog, Will Get Medal… The Bomb Squad That Saved St Paul’s… Cathedral Gives Thanks for 5 Heroes… Don’t put that schoolgirl complexion away ‘for the duration’—Palmolive soap still costs only 31/2d a tablet… Soho Girl Strangled—What’s this? Police surgeons have established that the blonde Soho dance hostess, Edith Parker, was strangled. Miss Parker, 26, was found murdered in her flat in Gresse Street, London, on Saturday. The killer committed further injuries with a poker.
I must have read it through three times before I realised. Strangled…injuries from a poker. Bit of a jolt, seeing it in the paper like that. It must have been…what? Thursday that it happened, but already it seems like a dream I had and can barely remember. Took a while to get reported in the paper— perhaps they didn’t find her straight off. It’s funny, because I can recall the place, but not her. It’s the room that’s in focus, the old-fashioned mantelpiece, dark wood, standing in front of it—dust on it—small table beside the bed, the feel of the little mirror in my hand. It all seems more real than she does. And there was an eiderdown—blue—with marks and spots, as if someone had spilt tea or soup or something. I threw it over the bed before I left. Edith Parker. Odd to think of her having a name. It seems far away now, not important. It says here she was blonde. Strange to see it reduced to this, like a combat report: all the intensity of it, the sensation, gone, and it’s just words on paper. Funny how you can do something that you can’t explain or describe. I don’t feel a connection with it, much. As if it happened to someone else. Funny altogether. But I’ll keep it, all the same.
Nothing much else in here. Mathy’s still sounding off about that bloody car. Nice day today, blitzy weather. I ought to empty my bladder before we get called again…
Edie’s a blonde, dilly, dilly; My true love was red; But when it gets dark, dilly, dally; She’ll do instead…
That’s better. Too much tea this morning. I don’t want to get caught short.
Don’t see many redheads. It ought to be a brunette next time, really. For balance. But soon, because there’s not much time left.