Teddy had been to see the memorial, shortly after it was unveiled in ’53 by the young Queen. “Why don’t I come with you?” Nancy had said. “We can make a weekend of it. Stay in Windsor or go up to London.” It was a pilgrimage, not a holiday, he tried to explain, and when he did go on his own, Nancy had been sparing in her farewells. He had “shut her out” from his war, she said, which he found ironic for someone whose own war had been so clandestine and who on the rare occasions when they had met during it had spent a good deal of time urging him to forget the hostilities so that they could enjoy their time together. He was sorry now. Why shouldn’t they have made a weekend of it?
“ ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,’ ” he said to Sunny, when he sauntered back.
“Eh?” Sunny said.
“ ‘Untouched by morning and untouched by noon, sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, rafter of satin and roof of stone.’ Emily Dickinson. It was your mother, funnily enough, who introduced me to her. She was a poet,” he added when Sunny looked puzzled, as if he was mentally riffling through a list of Viola’s acquaintances to find an Emily Dickinson. “Dead. American,” Teddy added. “Quite morbid, you might like her. ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died.’ ” Sunny perked up.
“I’ll walk for a little bit,” Teddy said. Sunny helped him heave himself out of the wheelchair and gave him his arm so they could hobble slowly along the ranks of the dead.
He would have liked to have talked to his grandson about these men. How they were betrayed by that wily fox, Churchill, who never even mentioned them in his Victory Day speech, how they were given neither medal nor memorial, how Harris was pilloried for a policy he hadn’t devised, although God knows he had carried it out with wretched zeal towards the end. But what good would it do? (Here comes the history lesson.)
“So…” Sunny said, scuffing the toe of his boot against a gravestone. The boots were ugly, unpolished things that looked as if they belonged on the feet of a paratrooper. “So did you see, like, really bad things?”
“Bad things?”
Sunny shrugged. “Grisly.” He shrugged again. “Awful.”
Teddy didn’t really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their own. Sunny had confessed yesterday that he’d “quite like” to be a vampire.
“Ghoulish,” he added, as if Teddy might not have understood “grisly” and “awful.” Teddy thought about the Canadian flight instructor who had been stripped of his flesh and of everything “awful” that had happened afterwards. Good luck to you then. A propeller flying through the air. What was that WAAF’s name? Hilda? Yes, Hilda. She was tall with a round face, plump features. Often drove them out to dispersal. She had been a good pal of Stella’s. Stella was an R/T girl whose plummy drawl provided a welcome voice for exhausted crews returning from ops. He had liked Stella, thought that there might be something between them, but there never was.
Hilda was the cheerful sort. “Good luck, boys!” He could see her saying it now. Always hungry. If they came back with any rations left over they gave them to Hilda. Sandwiches, sweets, anything. Teddy laughed. It seemed such an odd thing to be remembered for.
“Grandpa?”
It had been just before the end, before Nuremberg. He had been out at dispersal, talking to one of the fitters about F-Fox, his aircraft at the time. They had watched together as another aircraft approached, a very late returner from the previous night’s op. It looked wounded, certainly looked like it was heading for a shaky landing. And there was Hilda, cycling sedately along the perimeter path. It was a huge airfield, everyone cycled. Even Teddy had an old boneshaker of a bike, although as a wing commander he had access to an RAF car as well. He had wondered what Hilda was doing out there. He would never know the answer to that. The damaged kite roared towards the runway, but Hilda barely gave it a glance. She caught sight of Teddy and waved. She never saw the propeller coming off, one of the blades breaking free, shearing through the air with astonishing speed, a huge sycamore seed spinning and spinning so fast that there was no time for Teddy or his fitter to react. No time to yell, “Watch out!” She didn’t see it coming, that was something, Teddy supposed. It was just bad luck, a case of inches and seconds. “Shame she was so tall,” the fitter said afterwards, practical to a fault.
“Grandpa?”
Decapitated. Her head cleaved off by the blade. He heard the shrill scream of a WAAF, louder than the ungodly sound of the wounded aircraft tearing the runway up. The bomb-aimer was killed in the crash, the navigator aboard already dead, hit by flak somewhere over the Ruhr. It seemed secondary. WAAFs were running towards Hilda, screaming and crying, and Teddy ordered them to go away, to get back to the Waafery and stay there, and he went out and picked up the head. It seemed wrong to expect anyone else to do it. The wheel of her bicycle was still spinning.
That’s what it was, a head, not Hilda any more. You couldn’t think of it as having anything to do with plump, cheerful Hilda. The next night he took Stella to a dance at a neighbouring squadron, but nothing ever came of it.
“Grandpa?”
“Lots of awful things happen in a war, Sunny. It doesn’t help to remember them. Best to avoid morbid thoughts.”
Are you looking for someone?” Sunny asked.
“Yes.”