I'll Get By (22 page)

So he took her in his arms, spooned her into his body and held her gently, loving her and feeling contented, even though they feared for each other and lied while the clock ticked away each second. Soon, she slept, the rise and fall of her chest and the steady pulse of her heart against his, reassuring him.

His precious few hours of normal life were used up too soon, but not wasted, he thought, as he quietly dressed, and drew the quilt up over her.

He gazed down at her, kissed her mouth and whispered words of love against her ear. He left her in the early hours of the morning – left her with the responsibility of their unborn infant, both of them pretending she was asleep to make the parting easier.

He stood outside waiting for Derek Smithson to arrive on the squadron’s shared Triumph 100 motorcycle. None of them knew who actually owned it.

One of the engineers had found it in a hedge, bent and battered, and after a while had adopted it as a squadron mascot, and had fixed it up. Leo’s car was languishing in a garage that had access to the lane at the back.

The air had a damp coolness to it. The moon had travelled on, the sky was dark, and rain showers pattered against the dark, sightless windows. There was a hint of orange in the sky to the west, but whether first light or fire Leo couldn’t tell. Both perhaps.

Smithy arrived, the bike growling, but with an occasional wounded cough thrown in. Leo took the pillion seat and they were off, the rain bouncing off their helmets and shoulders. He began to wonder what the day would bring.

For the last couple of weeks the airmen had snatched what rest and sustenance they could. Air raids had been constant and fairly predictable, but mostly they were confined to the industrial and dockyard areas. They slept in their clothes.

When they weren’t flying they used the accommodation on the base, for sleeping, writing letters or playing chess. Today they were home in time for breakfast. Clattering into the engineers’ workshop they abandoned the bike and followed their noses to the mess.

A battered Spitfire had just hopped over a line of trees and Leo’s eyes narrowed in on it as it skewed sideways to come into land.

Most of the flyers were awake, responding to the smell of breakfast.

‘G’day, Doc,’ they began to call out when they spotted him, and he grinned when someone began to whistle ‘Waltzing Matilda’. They were an unruly and disrespectful bunch of buggers, but he wouldn’t have them any different.

He slapped several strips of bacon and an egg between two pieces of toast, savoured every morsel then washed it down with a mug of tea.

The door opened and a young man entered. He stood there, looking as nervous as a fish on Friday. His face was familiar and Leo sifted through the dregs of his memory.

He was young, but not too young to have seen some action, for he walked with a limp. Approaching him, Leo held out hand. ‘Squadron Leader Leo Thornton.

‘If I’m not mistaken, you’re Edwin Richards.’

The lad looked pleased at being remembered. ‘Yes, sir. I’d prefer being called Eddie though.’

‘How did you come by the limp?’

Richards’ flushed. ‘I had a bit of a prang, and broke it. That was three months ago.’

‘What were you flying at the time?’

Richards looked even more embarrassed and lowered his voice. ‘Actually, I wasn’t flying anything. I was on my brother’s go-cart when the front end parted from the back. When the leg healed it was shorter than the other.’

‘Either it wasn’t stretched into position correctly before it was splinted or you tried to walk on it prematurely and moved it out of place. I can see the lump from here where it healed and the bone is overgrown. I’m surprised they allowed you to fly.’

‘I’d applied to become a pilot long before the accident and I was able to report to training school. I told them I’d pulled a muscle to explain the limp, and nobody looked too closely at it. It doesn’t hurt. A couple of days ago I was given instructions to report to you.’

‘Have you trained on Spits?’

‘I brought one with me,’ he said with schoolboyish pride.

‘Ah . . . is that what that aircraft is? How many flying hours have you put in since school cadet training?’

Richards shrugged as he admitted. ‘Twelve . . . six with the RAF.’

‘Let me see your log book.’

At least he hadn’t lied about the six. ‘Collins . . .’ Leo bawled across the room. ‘This is Eddie Richards. He’s yours, so take him up and give him a workout for half an hour.’

‘Have you seen what he arrived in, skipper? It’s patched up with corned beef tins and one wing is higher than the other. She drags her arse along the ground like a dog with worms.’

Eddie was as hot in defence of his ungainly first aircraft as a mother was of her infant. ‘She’s a bit of an antique and she rattles like hell, but she flies straight if you compensate for the wing. Her frame is twisted by hard landings, and she’s been pancaked a couple of times. As long as you put the tail down gently she doesn’t scrape.’

‘No wonder they got rid of her. She’s expendable. However, they should remember that pilots aren’t. But if it’s capable of being flown, we have to fly it. I’ll put you on the list for something more serviceable. You can have some breakfast when you come back and we’ll get an engineer to look her over.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Leo laughed. ‘You won’t thank me when you’re up there. Off you go then. Follow Collins and stick to him like glue.’

Surprisingly, both Eddie and his craft made it back, her faulty wing causing the craft to flap along the runway like an injured duck, her tail wagging from side to side. The watching pilots set up a cheer.

‘If he can fly that thing he can fly anything,’ Collins said when they walked into the ops room. ‘Well done, Eddie my boy. Go and get yourself some breakfast if there’s any left.’

The mechanics scratched their heads and gazed with pity upon Eddie’s ugly aircraft.

It was half past seven the next morning, when the telephone in the office rang.

Somebody cracked, ‘If that’s Hitler tell him to call back next month, I intend to sleep until then.’

‘Good luck to you?’

‘What day is it?’ someone else said through an extended yawn.

‘Wednesday.’

‘Dash it all . . . I hate Wednesdays.’

‘Scramble! Scramble!’

Pulling on life preservers, helmets and goggles, and grabbing up a parachute as they went, four of the pilots raced towards their orderly row of serviced Spitfires, their propellers just visible against a false dawn. Adrenalin gave their feet wings. Leo was one of them.

Engines coughed, fired, coughed again and fired up. Soon they began to peel off the rank and roar along the runway, water spitting from their tyres.

The sky was overcast, the land and sky sandwiched together with a smear of inky clouds.

Leo flew automatically, breaking free of earth and taking his plane up through the cloud and through a saturation of water that scrubbed over his craft’s metal skin. With nowhere else to go it shattered into droplets at the edge of the wing, and was scattered back into the vapour it had just left.

He broke through the cloud cover at 10,000 feet, and the sudden burst into a blaze of dazzling sunshine and azure sky reminded him for a moment of his Australian homeland.

But he had no room for nostalgia – no time to ponder on the welfare of his family – on his mother, father, and his brother, Alex, who’d married Esmé’s best friend, Minnie. They were safe unless, or until, the Asian countries became involved.

His companions were still with him; at the same time he was given a bearing of where the enemy had been spotted on the radar.

It was not long before the intruder was within their sights. It was a lone, twin-engined Dornier bomber, probably checking the coast for weather conditions or looking for convoys.

The Spitfires attacked one by one, and though the Dornier put up a fight it was soon banking in a cloud of smoke. It fell into the sea off Yarmouth and sank. There were no survivors.

There were other German planes on reconnaissance, guarded by numerous single-engined Messerschmitts.

Something was brewing . . .

The raids that day had a different pattern to them and were more numerous. The pilots began to show their exhaustion, and that was reflected in the losses.

The German aircraft kept coming in hundreds, and they were unrelenting. The squadron was kept busy.

In Whitehall Meggie was trawling through recent For Sale notices in newspapers when she came across the words
sea
and
lion
, either grouped together or mentioned separately in the same sentence. She crossed referenced them with a couple of editorial letters, but could make nothing sensible from the anagram.

The fact that sea was mentioned might be related to a convoy. The lion could be referring to the British coat of arms. Where else were there lions? Piccadilly circus . . . a zoo – Leo – Africa – golden syrup tins.

She hesitated. There was a biblical quote on the tin. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness.’ The legend was that Samson had slaughtered a lion. Later he discovered that bees had taken up residence in the lion’s body. Samson had tasted the honey and from that the adage of sweetness from strength had arisen.

So many mentions were too much of a coincidence.

With Nick having been out of the office for several days, supposedly visiting his ailing father in the country, she typed up her report and placed a sealed carbon copy in Gordon Frapp’s in-tray, along with her list of sources.

The original, she placed on Nick’s desk. It was gone the next morning, along with a couple of less urgent reports. She said nothing in case it caused gossip.

Gordon Frapp knew office protocol as well as she did, and could have noticed for himself if he’d bothered to look.

Frapp’s eyes gleamed when he read his copy.

‘Excellent, my dear. I was working on that one myself. We should have synchronized our findings. Is Lord Cowan not back yet?’ It was said too casually.

Truthfully, she said, ‘He may be, but I haven’t seen him.’

Frapp picked up the telephone and said he needed to see Bethuen urgently. He came back from the meeting with a pleased look on his face.

Bethuen called her into the office and leaned back in his chair. ‘I believe you helped Mr Frapp collate that sea lion information. Well done, young lady. That information is now on its way to Bletchley Park. It will be a feather in our departmental caps.’

Judith winked at her when she left, both of them knowing that only one person was likely to receive a feather, Bethuen himself.

‘I’ll be home a bit late tonight,’ Judith said when the door closed on her boss. ‘I’m going to have a drink with Alan Gibbs before he rejoins his ship. I’ll warm my dinner up when I get home.’

Later that day Frapp approached her and grumbled, ‘Bethuen has just given me a dressing down. He said he came out of it with egg on his face. Apparently, intelligence about Operation Sea Lion was delivered the night before. He said to be sure of our facts next time, and to do things through Lord Cowan. How can we when he’s absent all the time? Are you sure you haven’t seen him?’

‘Of course I’m sure. I don’t suppose we’re the only people doing this sort of work, do you?’

Nick turned up two days later in the afternoon. He looked pale and drawn.

Waiting until Gordon had left for the day he came to her desk, where she was busy covering up her typewriter.’

‘I have a bullet in my arm and it needs to be dug out. No questions asked. Can you do it?’

Her blood ran cold. ‘I haven’t got the stomach for that sort of thing. I could ask my aunt. She’s a nurse. But I know that she’d tell me to take you to outpatients.’

‘Who would be duty bound to report it to the authorities. I don’t want to involve her.’

‘What if I faint?’

He grinned. ‘I’ll faint with you, so you’ll have company.’

‘Be serious Nick.’

‘I am being serious. I would have dug it out myself if I could reach. But it’s in my left arm, and I’m left-handed and can’t manage it with my right. When we leave here follow me down to the river. My boat’s moored there and it has a first aid kit. The boat’s called
Petite Coccinelle.
’

Little Ladybird. What a pretty name to give a boat, she thought, dreading what lay ahead. ‘Give me time to lock this file in the cabinet first and tidy up.’

She reached the boat fifteen minutes later.

The boat was a small yacht with a navy-blue hull and her name painted in gold in an oblong of paler blue. The decks were varnished, though scuffed in places. It was the size of boat that could be managed by one person, and just the thing a navy man would own for his pleasure. That’s if he was a navy man. She had the feeling his uniform was one of convenience. Despite his unpredictable nature, there was a conventionality about Nick that was part of his upbringing, mostly kept for public display.

She stepped aboard and down the couple of steps into the small cabin. He’d changed from his uniform trousers into casual grey ones. His feet were clad only in grey socks. Obviously, he kept a change of clothes on his boat, as he was half out of his shirt.

‘Good . . . it didn’t take you long to get here.’

He had everything laid out ready on a padded sheet, a scalpel and hook, a bottle of iodine and some cotton wool, a pad of lint and a bandage. There was also a bowl of water and some soap to wash her hands in.

She blanched, and sucked in a breath when he pulled his shirt half off and the sleeve from his arm. The sight of the angry red lumps made her feel queasy.

He said, ‘It’s gone through the side and is lodged just under the skin at the back. It’s only a small bullet, little more than an air pistol. All you have to do is make a cut over the lump and hook the bullet out. Not too deep.’

‘I . . . I don’t know if I can.’

‘Let me assure you that you can. It will be like lifting an almond from its shell. Do it now, Margaret. The sooner it’s out the sooner it will heal.’

‘It will hurt you.’

‘No more than it’s hurting me now; I didn’t pick you for a coward. Get on with it . . . I can stand the pain and I’ll talk you through it.’