Day Read online

  ‘I found you for the skipper.’ This a mumbled chain of Black Country noises – I fownd yo fur the skippah – but never mind, because here was the first time that he’d said it – skipper – and felt the sparking kick inside his chest, beneath the weight of that single wing. Alfred had a skipper, he was under instructions, he was all right. He was solid while the whole place was uneasy with confusions he couldn’t fathom: restless men and the rattle of wind against loose metal somewhere and the lot of them left here after the pep talks to sort themselves out and knowing they’d have to manage, get this done right, because you couldn’t end up with the spare bods and the runts, couldn’t be forced into a crew with nothing but wazzock-looking baskets, the types who’d kill you.

  He’d thought it very quickly, but very clear – the types who’d kill you – he’d allowed that, but it made no impact, perhaps because he’d hoped he was already a little lucky, being fixed up, crewed up, safe.

  Lucky and almost showing a grin. He had his skipper.

  He’d been able to tell Pluckrose, ‘So come on then. Skipper’s waiting.’

  But the skipper needs to be first. If you’ve got to go dragging it up again, then you have to start with him.

  The skipper is the one who stood behind you and a touch to starboard, stood and waited for you to know it in all that crowd, to see if you had a sense of him, had instincts. When you turned he was solemn, arms folded, staring at you, the peak of his cap leaned forward so you caught no more than a glimmer from his inspection: he was keeping mum about it, but already seeming close to satisfied. ‘You married?’ Not making fun of you with this, not intending disrespect, letting it seem that you were pals in a way and you’d had other times together and this was the end of an old conversation, the last thing to check.

  He angled his head for an instant and then you could see his eyes, what you were certain must be proper pilot’s eyes – you hadn’t a clue about anything, but they really ought to be like this: their interest too far forward and an odd temperature at their back. Later, you’d see the same in other men and you would think of the skipper, whether you wanted to or not.

  You realised he was waiting for an answer and you choked out, ‘No, sir. I’m not,’ as if you were a boy, had never touched a woman.

  And, then again, you weren’t married and you had touched only yourself and then fretted about it and you were almost infin-itely younger than you thought.

  Infinitely: a word you’d learn soon – once infinity started to drive up and breathe against you. Infinity is fond of wars, they give it a way to come in.

  ‘No, sir. I’m not.’

  ‘Decided I’d ask. Better to have all bachelors. Simpler. That’s my plan.’ And he takes off his cap and he reaches forward and, before you can intend this, you are bare-headed also and shaking his hand. There’s the grumble and shout of so many others round you, nudges as men pass, and you drop the grip, but are together now. He examines your face and stops you moving and you watch something hard turn in the light, light grey of his look and you feel that he’ll do what he has to, whatever that might be, and it seems he’s caught this in you, too, and is content. You will both do everything required.

  ‘Position?’ He’s almost grinning.

  ‘I can take mid-upper, if I have to.’

  ‘But you’d rather not? Rather be out in the tail turret on your own.’

  ‘You get a nicer view.’ And they kill you. You’re the one they’re most likely to kill – that’s why it’s been what you’ve wanted, from the very first time you heard. ‘I like a nice view.’ From the very first time you heard.

  ‘Thought so.’ Said in a way that had warmth about it, when that was nothing you required – you only needed to get what you wanted, were asking to get what you wanted. And he gave it. ‘I thought I had the right man.’ And now he did grin. ‘I’m Peter Gibbs.’ He rubbed at his hair, letting you see that its colour annoyed him when he thought of it. ‘Or Sandy. For obvious reasons.’

  You had to raise your voice above a swell of noise and this had been known to make it unreliable, although at that moment you didn’t care. ‘Day, Alfred.’ Surprising yourself by saluting properly, absolutely the way they wanted, the way a well-disciplined dog might if it could. You stretched up into it, you added lustre to the service, you believed in the rank and believed in the man and believed in yourself, even yourself. After which you were embarrassed, naturally. Saluting with your cap off – how big a bloody fool could you be.

  But the skipper was easy about it as you covered your head, felt a sweat – and he was grinning again: for you, not at you. An officer’s accent, only not like an officer. ‘I do want a tight ship, Sergeant.’ This something he’s considered which he tells you to make it true. ‘But I don’t think we’ll have much time for ceremony.’ His voice with a kindness in it that will take you and lead you to trust. ‘Picked you first, because you have to watch my back. You sing out and I’ll fly us right up our own fundament if I have to. Make the attempt, anyway. Evasion will take place.’ And then, in case you think he’s a line-shooter, ‘But I’m a rotten pilot, actually. So this is your last chance to get away . . .’

  You grin to him for an answer, then press on, ‘Well, if all else fails, like, you can just take us round in circles anti-clockwise and screw the bulbs out of their searchlights . . .’ Which is a very old gag, but you need it to cover the pause, because neither of you can guess how this will be, but it’s impossible to admit that, no future in it, and so you let one plan seem as likely as another, because all of them have to be at least half mad and both of you have to sound certain when you are not and you suspect that you may start laughing, shadow-boxing, singing ‘Jerusalem’: you can’t predict: anything to lead your mind astray, because you are actually here and beginning to be aircrew and in a war – yourself in the whole of a war – and because you are so alive, so infinitely, infinitely alive.

  The skipper coughs, not complaining, but he would like to be in charge, thanks, and you enjoy quieting down for him, having him make you focus. You can focus – a good gunner concentrates.

  ‘Sergeant Day, I’m going to scout round for a bomb aimer. You get me a navigator, would you? Rendezvous by that fire bucket in ten minutes.’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’

  You’re almost off when he touches your arm, bends in to be level with you. ‘Look, I should suppose a gunner wants to shoot things, yes? Well, I rather hope I never let you get the chance. Unless you can aim with your head banging off the turret roof. I want to get us through and bomb. It’s our job to bomb. If you won’t like that you should tell me now.’

  ‘’Course. We have to bomb.’ But a disagreement in you, the taste of how they’ve trained you and liking to hit your target, understanding how to put yourself into a kill: one thousand, one hundred and fifty rounds per minute – you know the hot, dark trick of that.

  ‘Sure? I mean arse-splitting turns will not be in it.’

  You let go, though, because you have to: he’s your skipper. ‘If there’s a fighter in my way and getting too friendly, I’ll fire at it. But I’ll be singing out all the while.’ You liked that singing out – the way he would put it. ‘Don’t mind getting my head lamped when you dive – nothing valuable in there.’

  ‘When you say go, I go.’

  ‘When I say go, you go.’

  But he’ll get his wish: the bombing will always be the thing, what you’re for, what Bomber Harris says you’re for, the Big Boss. He says you’re to be the boys who bring the whirlwind.

  And you don’t only obey the skipper, you want to obey him and that makes a wonderful difference. Even if in the end it amounts to precisely the same thing. Saying more than you’d expected, ‘We’ll bomb. We’ll bomb the bastards.’ And you don’t mither, don’t flap, because you’re comfortable with Pilot Officer Gibbs; you always will be. The skipper is safe and
you know it. ‘Never mind me squirting tracer all over the shop – corkscrew us out of bother and we’ll make it home.’

  ‘When you say go, Boss.’

  ‘When I say go.’

  Then a different smile from him, bigger, a bit half soaked. ‘That’s the stuff, Boss. We’re agreed.’

  No reason for him to call you Boss – maybe he wants to feel lighter, because you’ve just given him command, or maybe because you’re small and this makes it funny. You never can work it out, but from now on he does call you Boss and this makes the others do the same until, by the end of the week, it’s your name. Silly one to pick when you’ve never been a boss of anything.

  When you bring him Pluckrose, again there’s a shake of the hand and you notice how the skipper moves: that he’s gentle, precise, and you might mistake him for being not much of a man, but really there is just no waste about him. He puts himself exactly where he chooses and is still. If he hit you, he would do it very quickly and very well.

  No bomb aimer, yet. ‘Sorry, Boss.’ Skip shrugs at you, enjoying that he’s rueful. ‘Couldn’t find anybody quite right. Who’s this?’

  Pluckrose in and explaining, before you can answer, which isn’t a shock.

  ‘Pluckrose. From a long line of Pluckroses: my father, and my grandfather and my so forth, all of them Pluckroses to a man and my mother, of course, picked it – plucked it – although possibly under the influence of drink – and so, having put up with it themselves, they were delighted they could pass it on to me.’ He doesn’t appear to breathe, ‘Those of them still living. The others might well have been less enthusiastic, although who knows – once a Pluckrose, I’d suppose always a Pluckrose.’ And the skipper watches him, unreadable and still, and you wonder if you’ve made a terrible mistake in bringing him a Pluckrose. ‘You can imagine how much I look forward to meeting strangers – especially popsies – and, my, how I liked my schools – all eight of them. I have really no education to speak of, can barely add up, so I wouldn’t rely on my calculations at any point – geometry is a foreign land to me – and foreign lands, of course: they’re a foreign land to me, too. Struan Macallum Pluckrose, that’s the complete set of luggage – the very tiniest touch of Scotland there on my mother’s side.’ Pluckrose blinks down at the skipper, allows a moment of remarkable silence, ‘Would you like to see my logbook?’

  Offering this before he’s asked, his face fighting between resignation and a peculiar kind of glee, and the skipper studying each page very calmly, closing it, softly handing it back. ‘Well, nobody’s said you’re dangerous.’

  ‘I can be very plausible, if I have to.’

  ‘Which might come in handy.’

  Pluckrose exhaling, seeming to lower by half an inch and no longer close to bellowing. ‘I’d hoped it might.’

  ‘Peter Gibbs. Sandy.’ The skipper rubs his neck, glances at his navigator – which is Pluckrose – and then at his tail gunner – which is you – and then the hangar where more knots are forming, pairs and teams of men gaining definition. ‘This is only a guess, you know . . .’ he murmurs just loud enough for the pair of you, his crew, ‘but I think we might take a bit of getting used to. So perhaps from now on, we should travel en masse, formate in a nice little vic and introduce ourselves together. Then they can take us or leave us in one go.’

  * * *

  Vasyl had declared lunch on the grass, unpacking half a decent loaf, cheese in a greaseproof wrapper, three boiled eggs. Awkward that – you can’t share three between two people.

  ‘Is fine. I have my knife.’ Vasyl seeming a touch shy, smoothing his hand into his trouser pocket and bringing out a clasp knife, a small thing. It could still do you harm, but was nothing to fuss about. ‘My famous knife, yes?’ Letting it lie on his palm for a moment until it became all innocence, cutlery, an object with no sense of purpose. Then he cut the egg lengthwise through its shell, very earnest, and making a good job of it, the blade plainly very sharp. ‘There, you see? Fair is fair.’ Holding out Alfred’s half in a wide, reddish hand.

  So they had one thing in common: understanding food.

  Bash, we called it in the camp. Bash. Maybe that made it easier to cope with. You expected things of food, you had high hopes; never quite knew where you were with bash. And you had to be careful with it, keep things equal and correct.

  Not that they didn’t have more than enough at the minute. A comfortable ration for this afternoon and a bottle of cold tea apiece – real tea, none of that ersatz stuff made out of daisies, or God knew what – and meals laid on for the rest of the time, generous portions.

  But you could still worry.

  The thought of food had followed Alfred for six years now, long after the end of the war: that and the preventative hunger, the drive to take what he saw, whenever he saw it, in case there was nothing else after. He’d kept chocolate with him every day; and a new slice of bread each morning, to help him be at ease. This was how you discovered that you were an animal – you caught yourself hoarding, savage, feeding: mind shut.

  You’d think all those books would make a difference, wouldn’t you, our kid? That’s what everyone said would happen. You end up around reading people, ones who like their words and are comfortable with them, and you show an interest, a curiosity, and that’s your affair and no one else’s business and you find yourself growing – a little chap, but big inside, quite roomy. Only then they pile in, the reading people, gang up on you and interfere and they want you to be like them, their boy, their babby, and they give you more refined concerns – according to them, you’ve never been bothered by anything worthwhile – so now you have rarefied worries and delicate problems, like your head’s been turned into a parlour and there’s nothing there can stand your touch – and they give you words that you can’t quite operate to put in your new voice and this is supposed to make you finer and a finished man. A great opportunity for self-improvement, war.

  Unless you’re hungry.

  Then you end up just like any other dog.

  Still, they’d had a point. Being an autodidact – horrible word, autodidact, but one of the first you teach yourself: all by yourself, without the reading people, without anyone – being an autodidact had made a difference. Without the books, you might not have been so thoroughly ashamed. Or disappointed. Your shame might have been unavoidable, very probably it was, but not your disappointment.

  Oh, give it a rest, though, can’t you? All of that was years ago and you could have had it worse.

  And you were warned – by someone who was taught in schools – Ivor Sands told you and his whole life is books – go scraping about in your past and you’ll get hurt, you’ll remember and hurt. But you wouldn’t be told.

  Alfred rubbed his fingers through his scalp.

  Won’t need a punch in the head at this rate – doing it very effectively from within.

  He lowered his eyelids, turned his face to the heat and stared at the muffled light, the blood sun.

  Time to get yourself in order, Day. No more self-indulgence. Think of your egg – your nice half chooky egg. That shouldn’t be neglected.

  He looked down at it, peeled away the shell, his mouth suddenly overinterested, wet.

  My, but wasn’t it all just a big, free university – the university of war – with HE and armour piercing and incendiaries, just for a lark. And so much to find out: the far edges of people and the bloody big doors into nowhere that you don’t want to know about.

  Enough of that, though. If you keep yourself in charge of your thinking then things stay friendly and polite.

  So keep in charge.

  And then what?

  Let us consider the things for which we should be grateful.

  For instance?

  For instance, you wouldn’t deny that it left you with a grand appreciation of your grub. When there is food, you d
on’t take it for granted. No indeed. It’s just as if you can’t help saying grace.

  Amen, straw women, rubber babbies all a-swimming.

  But those regulations no longer apply.

  No more playing silly buggers over God now, either.

  He focused himself on his egg and biting, hid inside that – the nice cling of the yolk, a dab of it slightly creamier where it was undercooked. ‘Nice enough, I suppose. No salt, though.’ When he licked his lips he could feel the tickle of hairs – eating was going to be different now, very slightly. He liked that.

  ‘Apologies. I forget my head.’

  Vasyl threw across a twist of paper that did indeed conceal a hollow full of salt. Must have been a Boy Scout. If the Ukraine had Boy Scouts. Alfred suspected that Uncle Joe would not be all that keen and wasn’t there some other outfit they had in Russia, some socialist arrangement?

  ‘An egg with salt, now that’s more like it.’ Bread made it better yet. Sip of tea. A modest slice of cheese. You couldn’t complain.

  ‘Want some of this?’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  Vasyl brought out a tin of Klim and, quick as you like, had it open, something about this seeming a kind of threat. It had been four years since Alfred had seen a tin of Klim and the tiny shock of the banded label, the fat, square lettering, hurt him slightly, made him swallow. ‘Bloody, bloody hell.’ Klim had been behind the wire. It didn’t belong in 1949.

  ‘You don’t like? Milk – is good for you.’ Vasyl watchful, more interested than he should be. ‘Make you grow long bones.’

  ‘Bones are long enough, thanks.’ Being sure to sound sharp. ‘Wouldn’t want to grow out of my clothes. At home we all have to economise, you know. Save pounds, get dollars, that kind of thing.’ Because you couldn’t let him start assuming you would put up with anything. Unwise to stand out, or throw your weight around, but you couldn’t let somebody mark you as a target, either. Show them you’re not afraid and then you’re halfway to winning the fight. ‘Just a surprise to see it. Klim. For some reason I’d have thought they’d blow every Klim production plant sky high and then bury every tin of it at sea. Bloody Klim, from bloody herds of swoc, eating bloody fields of bloody ssarg. I took it as a sign that somebody out in the world had a sense of humour. Very necessary, a sense of humour.’ This was too long, too big, giving Vasyl leverage he could use. Which was what he’d wanted, no doubt. Better not to get angry, though, because that could lead to weakness and other sorts of grief. ‘But maybe I’m taking things too much to heart, just because I still dream of the stuff. Often.’ Wrong – Alfred watched in Vasyl’s eyes how this invited an intrusion, showed a fast way in. ‘And everyone’s been so busy in the peace: keeping the rationing going, taking whatever they like, making sure that we stay cheerful and all get what we deserve. We’ve every one of us got what we fought for, hadn’t you heard?’ Alfred aware that he now sounded as bitter as Ivor Sands, when he wasn’t like Ivor, was sure that he wasn’t as damaged as that. Still, despite his complaining, Alfred reached and took the can, shook out a palmful of that old, dry sweetness. ‘Christ.’