Teddy switched off Q-Queenie’s lights and pulled back on the controls to take her up again. Somewhere, anywhere but there, because he could see tracer fire crossing in front of them and the gunners were yelling that there was a bandit, but neither of them seemed to know where he was and their guns were hosing all over the sky. There was no sky to corkscrew down into, not enough speed to do anything, and he thought perhaps the best thing he could do was just land any old how, pancake down on whatever was below them.
Before he could do anything, Q-Queenie was pummelled by cannon fire from the fighter. It must have hit her in the undercarriage because they landed on one wheel and she tipped over, one wing high, the other digging into the ground, and they left the runway and screamed through a field before hitting a tree that they all swore had never been there before but was real enough to flip them over, like a giant insect, and the world inside Q-Queenie was turned upside down.
There were a lot of groans coming from behind Teddy, but they were the groans of people who had been thrown around, bruised and battered, not mortally wounded. He could hear a lot of angry Norwegian. Only Keith was silent, and Sandy Worthington and their Geordie mid-upper kicked open the bottom—now top—escape hatch and helped to drag him through it.
As they exited the topsy-turvy aircraft, the flare-path lights came back on and Teddy was surprised to see that they were still within the boundary of the airfield and the blood wagon and fire engine were already racing out to them. Apart from the fact that they were upside down—or perhaps because of it—it was a miraculous landing. For this “brave deed” he added to the fruit salad of ribbons on his uniform—a bar to go with his DFC.
Keith had lost a lot of blood, he’d been hit by the cannon fire before they crashed. He was deathly silent although his eyes were half open and his little finger was fluttering. No last words. Well, good luck to you then.
They laid him on the ground, and Teddy pulled him on to his lap and held him in his arms, awkwardly, a brutal pietà. Keith’s luck had ceased to be widdershins and had become ordinary rotten stuff. And it had run out. Teddy knew he wasn’t going to last more than a few seconds and saw the moment when the finger stopped fluttering and the half-open eyes lost the light, and he was sorry that he couldn’t think of anything to say to Keith that might have made him feel better about leaving this life. But there wasn’t anything really, was there?
When he got back to his quarters, Teddy stripped off his bloody uniform and emptied the pockets. His cigarettes, the silver hare and, finally, the tardily taken photograph of himself and Nancy and the dog on the promenade by the sea. A smear across the top, still wet. Keith’s blood. It seemed precious, like a relic. “Tea,” he told his granddaughter when she asked about it, not because she wouldn’t have been interested but because it was a private thing.
He showed his feelings to the dog alone, pressing his face into the fur of its neck to stifle his emotions. It suffered for a while and then struggled out of his arms.
“Sorry,” Teddy said, pulling himself together.
But that was several weeks away yet, in the future. Now, in the present, in the Royal Albert Hall, Beethoven was performing his secret ministry on Teddy.
Teddy resolved to simply feel the music and stopped searching for words to describe it, and by the time the fourth movement came around and Roy Henderson, the baritone, began to sing (O Freude!), the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. In her seat beside him, Ursula was almost quivering with the power of emotion, like a coiled spring, a bird ready to rise from the ground at any moment. Towards the end of the final movement, when the magnificence of the Choral becomes almost unbearable, Teddy had the odd sensation that he might actually have to hold on to his sister to prevent her rising into the air and taking flight.
They left the Albert Hall and walked into the balmy evening. They were silent for a long time as the dusk gathered around them.
“Numinous,” Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. “There’s a spark of the divine in the world—not God, we’re done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but something more profound…?”
“I think it’s perhaps something we don’t have a name for,” Teddy said. “We want to name everything. Perhaps that’s where we’ve gone wrong.”
“ ‘And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.’ Having dominion over everything has been a terrible curse.”
Afterwards—because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy—he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.
1960
His Little Unremembered Acts of Kindness and of Love