It transpired that Sunny had a provisional driving licence. Teddy tried not to show surprise, he was so used to Viola telling him about Sunny’s incompetence and general lack of initiative. “Right, then,” Teddy said, “my car’s just sitting in the garage feeling neglected, let’s take her for a spin. Viola’s old L-plates are in there somewhere.” Viola had been very resistant to instruction.
“Really?” Sunny said doubtfully. “Mum won’t get in the car with me any more. She says she wants to die of old age.” Teddy didn’t think that getting in a car with Sunny in the driving seat could measure up to flying night after dark night into the heart of an enemy whose only desire was to kill him and said, “You’ll never learn if you don’t do it, come on.” Someone had to have some confidence in the boy, Teddy thought. They packed the wheelchair that the NHS had loaned him into the boot of the car and set off.
They ended up in Harrogate, a town Teddy was fond of. He had gone there often, both during the war and since. They parked the car in the town centre, although it took a very long time to slot it into a space as Sunny didn’t seem to understand the difference between left and right, backwards and forwards. He wasn’t a bad driver though—slow and hesitant, but his nerves grew stronger when he realized that Teddy, unlike Viola, wasn’t going to shout at him all the time. “Practice makes perfect,” Teddy said encouragingly.
They had a nice lunch in Bettys and then went into the Valley Gardens. Here and there the first shoots of spring were making a reassuring reappearance in the damp earth. Sunny tended to push the wheelchair a little too fast and Teddy rather wished that they could swap places for a while so that Sunny could experience how uncomfortable it was when you went over bumps and kerbs, but on the whole Teddy was rather pleased with how this outing was going. “Do you know what I’d like to do before we go back?” he said as they did a (somewhat alarming) U-turn and headed back towards town.
A cemetery?” Sunny said. He’d never been in a cemetery, it turned out. He hadn’t been to his father’s funeral and he didn’t know anyone else who had died.
“Stonefall,” Teddy told him. “Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It’s mainly Canadians buried here. A few of the Aussies and Kiwis, a handful of Americans and Brits.”
“Oh,” Sunny said. It was hard to engage the boy’s interest.
An acreage of the dead. Neat rows of white gravestones—hard pillows for their green beds. Crews buried next to each other, kept together in the next life as they had been in this one. Pilots, engineers, navigators, wireless operators, gunners, bomb-aimers. Twenty years old, twenty-one, nineteen. Sunny’s age. Teddy had known a boy who had lied magnificently about his age and had been the qualified pilot of a Halifax by the age of eighteen. Dead by the time he was nineteen. Could Sunny have done what he did? What they all did? Thank goodness he didn’t have to.
“They were just boys,” Teddy said to Sunny. But they had seemed like men, had done the job of men. They had grown younger as Teddy had grown older. They’d sacrificed their lives so that Sunny could live his—did he understand that? Teddy supposed you shouldn’t expect gratitude. Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving. “ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” he remembered Sylvie saying, “is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.”
“These aren’t the crews of aircraft that were shot down over enemy territory,” Teddy said to Sunny. “These are just” (just!) “the ones who died on training flights—over eight thousand altogether.” (Here comes the history lesson, he heard Viola say.) “Or quite a few of these boys will have been killed when they crash-landed on return, or died later in Harrogate hospital from wounds they received on a raid.” But Sunny had ambled off along the rows of the dead. Shoulders up, head down, he never seemed to really look at anything. Perhaps he didn’t want to see.
“At least they have a grave, that’s something, I suppose,” Teddy said, continuing to talk to Sunny even though he was apparently out of earshot. It was a trick he learned when Sunny was little. He might not look as if he was listening but he had the hearing of a dog and Teddy had always hoped that he would absorb knowledge, more by osmosis than an intellectual process. “Over twenty thousand bomber crew don’t have a grave,” he said. “There’s a memorial at Runnymede.” For the ones who had no stone pillow to rest their heads on, whose names were written on water, scorched into the earth, atomized into the air. Legion.