A Song At Twilight Read online

  ‘So long as you ask some girls as well,’ Robin Fairbanks observed, joining them with a pint in his hand. ‘I’m not cuddling up to any of these oiks.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be girls,’ Andrew said airily. ‘I’m asking a few of the WAAFs. But no hanky-panky, mind. This is to be a refined party, not the sort of brawl we have here in the mess.’

  Ben grinned. He’d been startled at his first encounter with a mess ‘brawl’, with the airmen hurling themselves at each other rather as they hurled their planes about in the sky, somersaulting over rows of chairs and tables and ending in a struggling heap on the floor. It had all seemed rather juvenile to the eighteen-year-old not long out of school, who had expected a little more gravitas from senior officers. But he’d soon come to recognise that this was a vital way of letting off steam, recovering from the strains and tensions of risking your life in the air, watching a plane you had destroyed explode beneath you, and coming back to find that yet another of your friends had lived his last day.

  ‘Will your wife mind having a lot of idiots invading her house?’ Robin enquired seriously. ‘Does she realise what she’s letting herself in for?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s got plenty of experience. We’ve been married four years now, you know – been at Manston and Tangmere and one or two other stations. She’s well used to RAF types.’

  ‘And she’s still prepared to let us into her home?’ Robin said, shaking his head in mock wonder. ‘Well, so be it. I’ll do my best to keep order.’

  Andrew grinned. ‘You won’t have to. Alison can keep order. In fact, she’d make a very good Group Commander. Now look, I’ll leave Stefan here in your capable hands. Treat him gently, mind – they’re damned good flyers, the Polish.’ He went off, leaving the small group to settle themselves in armchairs and look at each other.

  ‘So how long have you been flying?’ the Pole asked Ben and Tony. ‘You look very young.’

  ‘I’m twenty,’ Ben said with dignity. ‘And Tony here’s an old man of twenty-one – had his birthday on our last station. Got the key of the door and everything. We’ve been flying two years.’

  ‘Only just joined here, though,’ Tony added. ‘Haven’t started ops flying yet. Hoping to do so next week.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any question about that,’ Robin observed, filling his pipe with tobacco. ‘All three of you will be up.’ He glanced at Stefan. ‘It’s unusual to have one of you chaps in with us, though. You usually stick with your own squadrons.’

  Stefan looked across at the far corner of the mess, where some others wearing the same uniform were drinking steadily, as though competing for some prize. ‘Andrew asked if he could borrow one of us. I volunteered.’

  ‘Volunteered!’ Robin exclaimed. ‘It’s easy to tell you’re not English. That’s the first thing we learn when we join up – never volunteer for anything.’

  The Pole gave him an unsmiling glance. ‘I volunteered because your squadron is the best on Harrowbeer and I want to fly with the best. There is then much more chance of killing Germans.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course there is,’ Robin said, slightly taken aback by the pilot’s intensity. ‘That’s what we all want to do.’ He glanced at the other two and then said, ‘I’d better be off too. Things to do, you know. Find a clean shirt for Saturday night, that sort of thing.’ He stuck his pipe into his mouth and sauntered off, leaving the three newest members of the squadron together.

  Stefan watched him. ‘I’m afraid your friend doesn’t like me. I take it all too seriously – I let my feelings show too much. I don’t have the British stiff upper lip.’ He drank from his glass and then set it down with a small thump. His voice shook a little. ‘But if he had seen what I have seen – people forced to wear yellow stars on their sleeves and live behind brick walls, people shot down in the streets, just for daring to walk along them – then perhaps he would take the same attitude. You don’t really know what war is in this country. You have no idea at all.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Ben protested. ‘We might not have been invaded, but we’ve been through some pretty foul times. Our cities blitzed almost out of existence, thousands of civilian casualties, men lost at sea. And Dunkirk too, when our whole Army could have been lost if we hadn’t managed to rescue them. Not to mention the Battle of Britain. I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what war is about.’

  They regarded each other for a moment, and then Stefan inclined his blond head. ‘Yes. You have an idea, certainly. But at least you know your families are as safe as everyone else. You don’t live with the fear that they may have been taken to concentration camps. You can write them a letter and they will answer. You can pick up a telephone and hear their voices.’ His voice shook a little, and he stood up and clicked his heels together. ‘I’m sorry. This is not the place for such talk. We’re supposed to relax here, not upset each other. I’ll go to my room.’

  He turned and walked away, his back as stiff as if an iron rod had been inserted in his jacket. The other two looked at each other and Ben blew out his cheeks.

  ‘Well!’ he said. ‘I know he’s right, but he’s not exactly the sort of company you want at a party, is he? I just hope he leaves his cloak of misery behind on Saturday evening.’

  They got up and drifted over to join a crowd of pilots who were roaring with laughter at Duncan Aird, a tall, rangy Scotsman with a pawky sense of humour and an inexhaustible fund of dirty jokes. For a while, they tried to forget about Tubby Marsh’s death, and the passionate intensity of Stefan’s words. But it wasn’t long before Tony wandered off and disappeared through the door, and a few minutes later Ben followed and found him making his way towards the huts where they had their rooms.

  Above them, the stars hung in a huge, inverted bowl of darkest blue. There was no ‘bomber’s moon’ and except for the occasional hoot of an owl the night was silent. There were no lights to be seen anywhere, either on the bleak wilderness of the moor, or from the towns of Tavistock to the north and the ruins of Plymouth to the south. The darkness was almost solid.

  Yet there was no sense of peace. It was as if the profound darkness and silence were a threat rather than a reassurance. At any moment, the alarm could sound and send men scurrying to their aircraft. Or a flight of enemy planes could come screaming out of that huge inverted bowl, scattering bombs and gunfire over the entire airfield. The men they were growing to know, the men they would fly with, even they themselves, could all be killed in the moment it took to visualise the scene.

  ‘I think we know what war is,’ Ben said at last.

  May was delighted to help out at the party and accepted the offer of payment without demur. Alison understood that the situation between them was now accepted; on the one part was friendship, with favours given and received on both sides, on the other a purely business relationship. Apples, eggs and cream could be offered as gifts, or requested and paid for, and the servant was worthy of her hire.

  ‘Not that I think of you as a servant,’ Alison said quickly. ‘We had a cook and a couple of maids at home – my parents’ home, I mean. But that was before the war. My mother doesn’t have any help now, except for a village woman who comes in three days a week. Most of them are doing war work.’

  They had been making bread in the Prettyjohns’ kitchen as they talked. It was a long-drawn-out but satisfying process, with time while the dough was ‘resting’ to complete other tasks, such as bottling plums or making more jam.

  Although Alison had known the family for less than a fortnight, she felt almost as at home in their cottage as she did in her own. The rooms were comfortably cluttered, with old-fashioned ornaments and china on the shelves and a row of gleaming horse-brasses hanging from the oak mantelpiece. Sagging armchairs stood on either side of the fireplace, piled with cushions and, as often as not, occupied by the two cats, Ginger and Blackbird. The kitchen was always warm and smelled of cooking, either the bread they were making now, the fruit and sugar for jam, or whatever was being prepared for that day’
s dinner.

  Hughie, too, enjoyed going to the Prettyjohns’ cottage. He had struck up a firm friendship with old Mr Prettyjohn and the two spent hours out in the garden, tidying and digging, or just sitting in the sun holding long conversations. Alison often thought that Hughie sounded like an old man himself, earnestly discussing the ways of birds and animals or other mysteries of the natural world.

  ‘My daddy flies up the sky,’ she heard him say one day. ‘He can go right up to the sun. He fights Germans.’

  Alison paused in what she was doing, wondering how on earth he knew that. She and Andrew never discussed the war in front of him, thinking that at three years old he was too young to understand. But it was inevitable that he would pick up something from the talk that was all around, from the people they met in the village street and the airmen who came to the house to drink tea, to the wireless with its talks and news and comedy programmes like ITMA and the Charlie Chester show. It might seem to go over his head, but he was bound to hear and repeat some of it. He probably didn’t even know what a German was.

  By now, Alison had also met May’s father, William Prettyjohn, who spent his time in bed upstairs. She had been relieved to find that his room wasn’t a bit like a sickroom – his wife and daughter had done their best to make it as much like a living room as possible, with chairs for the rest of the family to sit in when they were spending time with him. The bed was close to the window so that he could look down into the garden and across the fields, and his view stretched all the way across the Tavy valley to Cornwall. Beside the bed was a small table and a bookshelf, and it was obvious that he was a great reader. He also oversaw the work in the garden, planning what would be grown and where it should be planted, and conferring with his own father, the gnarled old man who did most of the work.

  ‘I may be paralysed,’ he said to Alison the first time they met, ‘but that don’t mean I can’t do my bit.’ He looked at her with bright eyes. ‘I dare say you’m somethin’ of a reader, too.’

  ‘Well, I do like reading,’ she agreed, surprised by some of the titles on his bookshelf. He had all Dickens’s works and most of Trollope’s and Jane Austen’s, as well as Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle. He caught her glance and his mouth twitched.

  ‘Us was lucky to have a teacher down in Buckland school that knew what a good book was,’ he said. ‘Not like they read today, all these comics and Enid Blyton. And I’ve had time to catch up since me fall.’

  ‘Have you read all of them?’ she asked. Although she had read Jane Austen and some of Dickens, she had never tried Collins or Trollope and felt slightly ashamed.

  ‘Over and over again,’ he answered. ‘You can always go back to a good book, you know.’

  Since then they’d had several chats. Alison had borrowed Barchester Towers and promised to look out for books for him. He wanted some more of Eden Philpotts’ books, explaining that this was a Devon author who wrote very fine tales about Dartmoor. ‘’Tis good to read about places you know,’ he said. ‘And he’ve got good things to say, too. Understanding things. He makes you think a bit. I get plenty of time for thinking, these days.’

  Alison had time for thinking too, as she picked blackberries, made jam and bread, played with Hughie and tried to dream up interesting meals to give to Andrew when he came home in the evenings. It wasn’t always easy, because she never knew for certain that he would be in. Sometimes the squadron was kept busy flying almost all day, and as soon as the mechanics had made sure the planes were fit to fly again, they could be back in the sky. Mostly, they were patrolling the Channel, guarding both naval and merchant ships, but an alarm meant they were up within minutes, and then a battle would ensue and those on the ground could do no more than wait anxiously until it was over and the planes were safely back. Since Hitler had invaded Russia, however, there were fewer raids over Britain and the work of the fighters was mostly confined to patrols, shipping protection and accompanying bombers on their own raids.

  Still, as often as not, there would be one or more missing when the squadrons returned. And although, as now, the loss seemed almost too painful to bear sometimes, she had learned, as they had all had to learn, to put away her sorrow and concentrate on the joy.

  It was all anyone could do.

  Chapter Six

  There were no alarms on Saturday evening, but the squadron had been flying all day and by the time Andrew arrived home, Hughie was fast asleep in bed and Alison and May had laid out a spread of sausage rolls and sandwiches. There was plenty of beer and a couple of bottles of sherry, together with two large jugs of orange squash. The gramophone was ready, with some fresh needles and a pile of dance records beside it, and the square of carpet in the front part of the living room had been rolled back to expose the floorboards, which May had insisted on polishing.

  ‘I don’t want you coming here to clean and polish,’ Alison protested, trying to take the cloth away from her hand, but May held on to it firmly.

  ‘If you’m going to pay me to be here, I ought to be doing something. I don’t want to be paid for sitting doing nothing.’ She glinted a look at Alison from her dark brown eyes. ‘Besides, you didn’t ought to be doing this sort of work, in your condition.’

  ‘My condition!’ Alison exclaimed, feeling the blush rise up from her neck. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything because I might be talking out of turn, but Mother thinks you’m expecting. She can always tell, she says, when a woman’s in her third month. So you can ask me to mind my own business if you like, but—’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’m just surprised, that’s all.’ Alison glanced down at her slim figure. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to see yet, and I haven’t been sick or anything – in fact, I didn’t really think I could be pregnant, until I saw the doctor. But you’re right. Perhaps I ought to have come to see your mother first!’

  May sat back on her heels and beamed up at her. ‘Well, there’s some nice news. So it’s all right if I tell Mother, is it? She’ll be well pleased, and so will Father. And Grandpa, too. ‘Twill be nice to have another little tacker about the place.’ She hesitated, then added a trifle anxiously, ‘You’m pleased about it, I hope? And Mr Knight?’

  ‘Oh yes, we’re thrilled. We hadn’t intended it to happen just yet, not with the way things are, with the war and everything. I mean, you wonder if it’s right to bring children into the world just now, don’t you? But it all seems to be going on for so long, we just didn’t want to wait any longer to give Hughie a brother or sister. And so here I am.’ She laid her hand on her flat stomach. ‘It’s rather hard to believe, that’s all. That there’s a new human being just starting to grow in here. It’s like a sort of miracle.’ She laughed, feeling suddenly embarrassed. ‘I suppose everyone thinks that, yet it’s happening every day. It’s not even as though it’s my first time.’

  ‘That don’t stop it being a miracle.’ May finished her polishing and got up. ‘If you ask me, all life’s a miracle and that’s why we’ve got to try to look after it. From a tiny baby to the whole world.’ She took her cloth and tin of polish out to the kitchen and put them away in the cupboard. ‘There, that’s done, and it looks all the better for it. Smells good, too.’

  ‘It’s lovely. Thank you, May.’ Alison went to the window and looked out along the narrow lane. ‘They should be arriving any minute – oh, here comes Andrew now.’

  Andrew wheeled his bicycle up the path and leaned it against the front of the house. The Morris 8 had been put into a corner of one of the barns at the nearby farm, for use only on high days and holidays, and only then when the petrol could be obtained. Most of the time, like all the other men on the station, he used the cycle he’d been issued with.

  He had taken his time cycling home this evening. His mind had been filled with thoughts of the friend he had lost, the gap that had been left in his life. He had been disconcerted by the depth of his feeling for Tubby Marsh, and didn’t really know how to deal wi
th the grief he was experiencing. Accustomed as he was to losing pilots – particularly during the Battle of Britain, when he had had his own crash, but also since then – he had also grown accustomed to buttoning his feelings down tightly beneath the surface. But with Tubby, it was different. With Tubby, he had lost his best friend – almost, as Alison had said, a brother – and, it seemed, a part of himself.

  To make it worse, he had seen that last desperate downward spiral into the sea. And he had heard Tubby’s screams in his ears.

  Cycling home along the darkened lane, Andrew had found himself trembling, so violently that he had been forced to stop and lean on a field gate for support. He rested his arms along the top rail and bent his head, wondering if he was going to be sick. The nausea passed slowly, and he lifted his head again, staring out over the twilit landscape. The hedges were filled with twittering birds, settling down for the night, and he wondered dully what the war meant to them. Did they notice the noise, or did they accustom themselves to it? Did they begrudge the loss of so much habitat on the moor, when the airfield had been built, or did they welcome the increase in food scraps from the kitchens and canteens? Did any of the things that humans did, to the world and to each other, matter to them or did they simply adapt?

  He became aware of a snuffling and snorting in the field. It was part of a large farm and pigs were kept here, to provide bacon and pork for Harrowbeer and for the national meat ration. The farmer and his son collected the waste from the kitchens at the airfield, and Alison had told him that the farmer would often find cutlery mixed up with it. You could hear the pigs playing with the knives and forks in the troughs when they had eaten the swill. Sometimes, when the wind was in the wrong direction, you were all too aware of the pigs not far away, but usually the smell blew the other way.