They went to Essen the next night, another maximum effort, and then were stood down for a much-needed twenty-four hours while the Americans took over, two daylight raids on Hamburg, one after the other, stoking the fires with incendiaries and creating more with their high explosives. Teddy felt sorry for the American fliers—travelling in tight formation in daylight they took the brunt of the German defences. Q-Queenie had made an emergency landing at Shipdham USAAF base a few weeks ago and they had been given a rousing welcome. They hardly ever came across their Allied counterparts, so it was heartening to find themselves in the midst of an American squadron whose fliers were, as Tommy, their Geordie, put it, “Just like us.” Except shinier and newer, the gloss not quite as worn off, although it soon would be. And with much, much better food, so that when she eventually returned to her own station Q-Queenie was laden with chocolate and cigarettes, canned fruit and goodwill.
The weather on their stand-down had been good and the crews lounged in lawn chairs or set up card tables outside. Someone organized a cricket match in an adjacent field, a rough, enjoyable game, but many simply slept, worn out by war. Teddy and Keith went for a long, lazy bike ride with a couple of WAAFs, Lucky lolloping beside them. When he got tired he was put in the basket on the front of one of the WAAFs’ bikes where he sat like a proud figurehead, his ears flattened by the breeze. “In the cockpit,” the WAAF said. Edith, a chop girl you couldn’t help feeling sorry for. The last three aircrew she had dated had failed to return from ops and now no one would go near her. In a darker moment Teddy had considered sleeping with her just to see what would happen to him afterwards. Perhaps he still would, he thought. She was keen on him, but then all the WAAFs were.
They ate fish-paste sandwiches and drank water from a stream and it was as if the Third Reich didn’t exist and England was restored to her green and pleasant self.
He checked his watch. Three o’clock. They would have eaten lunch at Fox Corner without him. He hoped so anyway. He had left Keith in their unholy clutches long enough, he supposed.
They crossed the meadow, in full summer regalia—flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies—and skirted the edges of one of the Home Farm’s big wheat fields. The wheat glimmered and undulated in the breeze. He had often worked on the harvest in these fields, punctuated by beer-and-cheese lunches with the farmhands beneath a hot sun. Hard to believe life was so simple once. He remembered it now as a romantic pre-war idyll, You sunburnt sicklemen of August weary, come hither from the furrow and be merry, but he supposed for the farmhands there was no Shakespearian pastoral to be found in their toiling and the harvest was just another turn of the agricultural year and its never-ending, grinding labour.
There was a scattering of poppies amongst the wheat, red spots of blood amongst the gold, and he thought of those other fields in that other war, his father’s war, and felt a great fall inside himself at the memory of Hugh. He wished his father was in Fox Corner, waiting for his return with a glass of beer in the garden or a tumbler of whisky in the growlery.
The dog had bounded off into the middle of the wheat and he could no longer see it but he could hear it barking with excitement, not nervous now, so it must have found some creature less threatening than a cow—a rabbit or a harvest mouse. Teddy whistled so that the dog could keep its bearings and navigate its way out of the field.
“Time to go,” he said, when it finally scampered back.
We thought we’d lost you,” Sylvie said crossly.
“Not yet,” Teddy said.
“All right?” Keith asked, handing him a glass of beer. Keith was sitting on the terrace, looking very at home. The great and the good appeared to have left.
He decided to spend the last night of his leave with Ursula. Keith was off on the razzle with some of his fellow countrymen.
Teddy walked through the parks and then took up a sentry post outside Ursula’s office and waited to surprise her when she came out from work.
“Teddy!”
“The very same.”
“And Lucky! What a treat to see him.” Again, Teddy felt himself coming in second to the dog. Lucky was beside himself at seeing Ursula again. “This is good timing,” she said, “or perhaps you’ll think it bad. How do you feel about chumming me along to the Proms? I’ve got two tickets and the friend who was coming with me has had to drop out. We can eat afterwards.”
“Splendid,” Teddy said, groaning inwardly at the idea of attending a concert, possibly the last thing he felt like doing. The sea air and his twenty-four-hour furlough with Nancy, not to mention the lunch at Fox Corner, had drained him of whatever reserve of energy he had left and he would rather have gone to a cinema and fallen asleep in the fuggy dark, or perhaps drunk the night into oblivion somewhere pleasantly unchallenging.
“Oh, good,” Ursula said.
She decided to leave the dog in her office. “Against the rules, I expect,” she said cheerfully, but there would be a lot of people working through the night, “and he’ll be spoiled rotten.” Lucky was a pragmatic dog and immediately attached himself to one of the secretaries.