Tears of Autumn, The (18 page)

On these occasions she’d ‘tarted’ herself up, had altered some of her pre-war dresses – shortening them, and, as stockings were
unobtainable, she’d stained her legs with brown colouring, and got Biff to draw a nice straight pencil line down the back for a seam, slapping his hand away as it wandered further than it should have.

Several times they went to the pub – he for a quiet pint, Rosemary sipping a small glass of cider. For him it was different from the mess where, often as not, it ended up with some excitement: great choruses of
Do you know the Muffin Man
as they tiptoed one by one across the floor with pints of beer on their heads, or ‘walked’ with sooted feet on the ceiling, having reached there by way of a great pile of mess furniture, singing:
You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean …
So it was nice to find a snug corner amongst all the copper and brassware, and talk sweet nothings. Until one night.

A boisterous crowd of Americans came in, jostling and whistling at some of the girls with their English boyfriends, who looked bleakly back. Some army lads arrived, and took up a position at the other end of the bar. The noise in the place greatly increased. Biff and Rosemary finished their drinks, then looked at each other. At the unspoken question in his eyes as he held up his empty glass, she murmured sleepily:

‘No, let’s go home.’

They stood up. As she edged her way through the crowd of Americans they ignored him, smiling and wisecracking as they let her past, making sure she had to brush against them. Biff was annoyed, but they were a long way from home, and were brothers in arms. And in any case, you made allowances – they were so brash and different in attitude and manners from what they were all used to.

But then one large crew-cut sergeant blocked her path, stepping to one side and then the other as she tried to pass.

She smiled. ‘Excuse me.’

The sergeant leered. ‘Any time, honey.’

‘I’d like to get by, please.’

Biff was slightly behind, elbowing his way through the others,
who were already reforming behind her, whistling and nudging each other. Biff only realized what was happening when the man said:

‘Well now, that’s going to cost you a little kiss, sweetie.’

Biff roughly pushed the last man aside and reached her as a large hand came round her waist and pulled her in against the sergeant’s barrel chest. As he leant down to kiss her Rosemary twisted to one side.

‘No! how dare you.’

Biff’s hand gripped the sergeant’s fingers and yanked them back, pulling the hand away.

‘Leave my wife alone.’

Beneath the crew-cut the square face went black with anger.

‘Stay out of this, buddy.’

Biff shook his head.

‘No,
you
get out of the way.’

‘Whoa.’ The sergeant looked around for support.

‘You hear this little limey, will ya?’

He turned back to Biff, leering.

‘You guys over here are all pantywaists, needed us to come and win the war for you.’

Grinning at everybody he said:

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

Incensed as he was, Biff bit down on his teeth and, pushing Rosemary, started to get past.

The Yank grabbed his arm and swung him around. Biff saw the pile-driver coming a mile off. He swayed back out of its path and stepped in to punch the big face with a straight left, carrying all the weight of his body behind it.

The man took down three of his buddies who tried to break his fall, but the others jumped on Biff, and the army lads charged at the same time like a row of Rugby forwards piling into the scrum.

Girls screamed, glasses were thrown, blood shot from mouths and noses. Biff somehow got out from under a pile of bodies,
stopping only to help the sergeant up, then hitting him again with such force that a tooth came flying out of his mouth. He crashed back to the floor and rolled over, all sixteen stone. He would only come round after the Snowdrops and Redcaps had barged in, quelling the warring sides with truncheons, nightsticks, and, quite unofficially, pickaxe handles.

By that time Biff, holding on to Rosemary’s hand, was legging it up the street.

She gasped: ‘Biff,
now
I can understand why they call you that.’ It must have been the adrenaline rush, but there was an animal heat in them both.

Up an alleyway, he lifted her up and she swung her legs around him. Held by him against the wall, Rosemary pulled her knickers aside and guided him in. It was all over in a couple of minutes.

They continued on their way in silence, as the realization of what they had just done sunk in, leaving them shaken and ashamed.

Before the war such behaviour, even the thought of it, would have horrified them both.

But the straitlaced society of the 1930s was coming apart in the shared danger and the close proximity of young men and women away from home, and with the arrival of the Yanks with their easier ways.

Not that they thought they would ever join the ranks of such lewd behaviour: after all, they had a home to go to.

Ruefully Biff worked his bruised hand and bit his lip.

‘Sorry, that was unforgivable, I don’t know what came over me.’

Rosemary clung to him.

‘Or me, Biff. It takes two, don’t forget.’

She gave an embarrassed giggle.

‘Anyway, I enjoyed it, but my back is killing me.’

The days passed easily; they got up late, stayed up late, walked, rode – they hired a couple of bony nags, and
Rosemary’s riding-breeches, smelling of damp, were replaced by a pair of bell bottoms she’d thrown into her case at the last moment for work around the house.

The last whole day dawned.

Rosemary was in the kitchen when he came down the steep narrow stairs, ducking his head under the low doorframe. The smell of fried bacon filled the room.

‘What’s this?’

She turned when she heard him.

‘I’m using the last of our rations – there won’t be time tomorrow morning.’

He nodded.

He would be seeing her to the bus, off to become an officer. Biff had another couple of days.

‘There.’ She placed the plate on the table before him turning back to get hers, using a tea towel to hold the hot plates.

They sat down, didn’t speak as he sprinkled salt on the fried egg – fresh ones from the farm where they went riding.

At last he said: ‘What shall we do today?’

Rosemary thought for a moment.

‘Biff, I’d like it if we just spent time around here – together.’

Which is what they did – cleaning, dusting, beating the carpets over the line in the back yard, even painting, using some tins from under the stairs which he’d put there in 1939. He cleaned the brushes outside, then came in to find Rosemary using a flatiron heated on the range, pressing her white shirt.

A pile of ironed clothes was on the end of the table.

‘There – that’s done.’

He put the brushes back under the stairs, and washed his hands in the sink.

They both knew that this studious domesticity was to cover the impending heartbreak of being separated again.

And for how long this time?

They’d got a chicken from the farmer, and some vegetables, and she’d baked an apple pie. Biff had found three bottles of red
wine when he’d rummaged around looking for the paint. He’d already opened one. It wasn’t bad.

Rosemary dressed for the occasion, and Biff did his best to look smart.

With the chicken on the table, and the vegetables steaming in their serving dishes, he poured her a glass of wine, then did his own.

When all was ready they clinked their glasses.

Biff said: ‘To us.’

Rosemary responded:

‘To us.’

When the meal was finished, he opened another bottle, and took it into the sitting room. Rosemary was in her favourite place of old, in front of the fire sitting on the floor, back to the sofa. Dance music was playing softly on the wireless.

He refilled her glass, then settled down beside her.

There didn’t seem to be any need to say anything, but eventually Rosemary murmured:

‘This bloody war has ruined everything, hasn’t it, Biff?’

He took several seconds to answer.

‘Yes.’

She took a sip of her wine. He noticed that Rosemary seemed to have difficulty swallowing. She turned her head away from the fire and faced him.

‘Do you realize that it will soon be the first of October again?’

He nodded, adding as if to underline what she had said. ‘Nineteen forty-three.’

She looked back at the grate.

‘Yes. It’s all so sad isn’t it?’

The fire crackled and snapped, spitting out an ember.

He flicked it quickly back, sucked at his fingers.

Her voice was resigned.

‘Do you think we’ll ever see them again, Biff?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps October ’forty-eight – if this war is over by then.’

But as he stared into the depths of the fire, the awful memory of the Hamburg raid came back to him.

That night they didn’t make love, just held each other in their arms, whispering, remembering, all those people they had known before the war; all the young people from school and the tennis clubs, and the parties. Where were they now? How many were still alive?

And inevitably they reminisced about the glorious days of their honeymoon, with Konrad and Anna in Sorrento. For a while they lapsed into silence at the memory. Neither wanted to sleep – to waste their last hours together, but of course they did, drifting off around two o’clock.

The alarm, set for 5.30, sounded like a fire bell. His swatting hand hit the plunger and the clock, knocking it off the cabinet.

They stumbled around, getting ready. Biff made a cup of tea, then helped her get her case down the stairs.

It was a twenty-minute walk in the fresh morning air. It had rained in the night. There was a small group huddled around the bus stop. They stood to one side, whispering out of earshot.

‘Take care now, darling.’

He smiled.

‘I will – and you – you go and be a good officer now.’

They lapsed into silence. With their arms wrapped around each other there didn’t seem anything else to say.

At last the bus showed around the bend, and braked to a halt. The waiting queue shuffled aboard, passing down the lower gangway or scuttling up the curved metal staircase.

Biff got her suitcase into the luggage area beneath the stairs and faced her on the platform.

She fought back tears, gave him a quick kiss as the conductor called out:

‘Hold tight.’

With a double ring and a crunch of gears the vehicle jerked forward.

With that Biff swung off the platform and stood in the middle of the road.

She remained where she was, waving, but he couldn’t see her for very long; the dim blue bulbs and the anti-blast net on the windows meant that the inside was almost invisible after twenty yards in the gloom.

He waved anyway, until the bus was out of sight.

Biff felt the pain coming back, knifing into his returning consciousness. And he needed to go to the lavatory again.

Clenching his teeth and holding his chest he got to the edge of the bed, rested there for a while, then the urgency to wee got too much.

Shakily he rose to his feet and, stumbling, made for the doorway. He could see the outlines of things, the dawn must be coming up.

Biff reached for the light cord, missed, and fell for the second time. He went down and hit the tiled floor hard, screaming out in pain.

The snapping sound of a shoulder bone was like a pistol shot.

On the cold floor he couldn’t help whimpering like an animal. He tried, but couldn’t reach the alarm button, the thing had twisted around his neck.

He called out.

‘Darling, help me. Darling – help me.’

After what seemed like hours the coldness around his lower body turned warm, and crept up to his shoulder and the pain began to ease.

He realized he was drifting in his dinghy. He must have used the last of the morphine shots. His mouth and lips felt like leather, cracked and dried. There was no more drinking water. It wouldn’t be long now.…

The second, and last pass of the Halifax over the U-boat had settled both their fates.

Even as he had straddled it with a stick of Torpex-filled depth charges, the eighty-eight mm flak cannon mounted behind the conning tower had ripped through the cockpit, killing his copilot instantly, and splattering him with blood and bits of tissue. Fire was raging in one engine and in the root of the other wing near a fuel tank.

It was only a matter of time before the Halifax blew up.

Down below in the blackness was the icy water off the coast of Norway.

It would be a miracle.…

He fought the controls, keeping her as steady as possible.

They’d left Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides at midnight, and after hours of patrolling the icy waters his operator had reported a contact on the ASV radar screen.

Guided on to the target, Biff had switched on his Leigh light mounted under the port wing. The twenty-four inch,
fifty-million
candle-power carbon arc searchlight had sent a concentrated beam of light flaring downward.

And there, still a shock, caught starkly in the harsh pool of light, was a U-boat
on the surface
, the muddy grey water foaming white around its shadowy hull.

He’d gone straight into the attack, but the anti-aircraft armament of the U-boats at this stage of the war was formidable. On the first pass at fifty feet the starboard engine had exploded in flame and black smoke.

But their stick of Torpex-filled depth charges fused to go off five seconds later at a depth of twenty-five feet, must have severely damaged the U-boat because there was no attempt at a crash dive.

The tracer fire had increased as they came around again, his gunners engaging in a fierce firefight.

As they passed over it, releasing a further stick of charges, there had been another explosion, and the Halifax had leapt in
the air. He knew it was a mortal wound, the elevators were badly damaged. The plane became almost uncontrollable.

He thrust the throttles full on, fought to gain height, ordered the crew out.

They protested but he shouted over the radio: ‘Go-go-go. I can’t hold her much longer.’

The navigator struggled up to him, looking wildly at the body of the co-pilot.

‘Sir, we could lash up the column, you could just make it.…’

Biff shook his head.

‘It won’t work. I’m barely holding her – go on – drop the survival boat and get out while you can. Go.’

A hand patted him on the shoulder.

‘See you in the mess, skipper.’

Freezing moist air blasted in through the fuselage as the hatch was released.

He waited as long as he could, then lost the struggle and began to lose height, going down in shallow circles.

He thought of Rosemary, and the life they would never have together. Dawn was just breaking, he could see the horizon but it was all black down below – until he saw the red glare.

As he drew lower he suddenly realized what it was: the
U-boat
on fire.

Biff knew he had little chance – ditching at night in an ice-cold sea that was running white horses – he’d seen them in the Leigh light.

So there was no real decision to be made. Here was one of the enemy that they had spent hours, days, months, criss-crossing grey empty oceans to find. An enemy that had sent millions of tons of shipping, with the loss of weapons, fuel and above all food to the bottom; had nearly brought Britain to its knees, and had killed so many sailors, drowning with oil-choked lungs in cold oceans with no known grave, or burnt to nothing in the enormous fires of burning tankers. He was only doing his job. Sweating with the effort, at fifty feet he levelled out and aimed
for the conning tower. At the last moment he could see men running around on the flame-lit deck. Tracer came at him from fore and aft, whipping soundlessly by, sometimes hitting the fuselage with a sound like gravel thrown at a dustbin. As the bridge filled the forward view he saw what must have been the captain standing upright, unflinching as the final act of their lives was played out with terrifying speed.

Just as the blazing Halifax came in, a huge explosion in the
U-boat
lifted her out of the water, breaking her back. The Halifax’s flaming wing sheered off as it struck the conning tower, the rest of the aircraft went spinning violently into the sea, breaking into hundreds of pieces.

From their dinghy the three survivors of the Halifax ‘C for Charlie’ could only see scores of little fires on the oily water about a mile away.

The wireless operator had managed to signal their attack as they went in. With a bit of luck the search and rescue boys would get to them that morning, and if the sea calmed they might even get a Sunderland from Sullen Voe setting down to pick them up; they could be in the bar, sinking a pint of ‘heavy’ by the evening.

But they didn’t talk much, they were in shock, and the motion of the enclosed rubber boat was making them sick.

As they clung on to the handles, facing each other, the
white-faced
navigator said: ‘He ought to get the top gong.’

‘Posthumous’ muttered somebody.

He came to when the cold water closed over his head. Choking, he fought back to the surface, helped by the inflated Mae West. He thrashed wildly around, then went under again as a green wave rolled past. When he came up he grabbed at a dark shape that seemed almost to lift off the top of the waves, catching the wind. As soon as his hands found the rope loops on the rubber he realized it was a dinghy, and from its size and shape, a German one – from the U-boat.

He knew he had to get into it
now
, or he’d die very soon in the
freezing water. It could only be a matter of minutes and then he wouldn’t have the strength.

With his first attempt he found his right arm was useless, and pain reverberated all over his chest.

He held on grimly, as wave after wave washed by. It dawned on him that roughly every fifth or sixth one was bigger, more powerful.

He knew he had the strength for only one more attempt – then he might as well let go and finish it sooner rather than later.

As soon as a large wave roared past he started counting and manoeuvring around so that the next would push him in the right direction. He began psyching himself up.

He heard it coming, hissing as it broke on the crest. As the powerful wave lifted him, he propelled himself up, and clawing with his good arm, rolled into the rubbery embrace of the dinghy – and right on to a body.

As Biff scrambled away in horror he realized, even in the dark, that the man was dead.

He was colder than the sea, colder than the air, cold as only the way a dead body can be.

Biff settled in the opposite corner, away from it, seeing only the dark bulk against the lighter outline of the stars.

The pain in his arm and chest, out of the embrace of the water, made him cry out in agony. Fumbling with his one good hand, he managed to pull out his survival kit from a thigh pocket. Just by the feel of its contents he found the morphine stick, pulled the cap off with his teeth, and stuck it into his thigh through a rip in the material.

As the pain lifted he drifted off into unconsciousness.

It was the squeaking and screaming of gulls that eventually brought him round. His body was stiff, and there was violent pain every time he moved his right arm: it felt broken. To begin with his eyes were stuck together. He had actually to use his fingers to prise one open, and then the brilliance of the daylight momentarily blinded him.

When he managed to take in his surroundings, it was to find he was all alone on a very calm, sunlit ocean.

The birds screamed again – and then he realized what they were doing: pecking at the face of the dead German opposite.

His mouth and throat were swollen and dry, unable to produce the shout he had intended. Instead only a hoarse croak escaped from his grossly swollen and cracked lips.

He swung his good arm, kicked out with a leg, scaring the birds off.

His eyes turned to the German’s head. Weirdly, it still had its cap on and the face possessed a large, but well-cut beard.

It was only then that he realized he had come face to face with his enemy: it was the captain of the U-boat.

Biff stared and stared. It was the first time in the long years of the war that he had ever been so close to any German before – the enemy had never been seen.

The face was swollen and black with blood and oil. There was a huge gash in the man’s side and lines of congealed blood: he had bled to death. Thick oil was caked in his beard.

It was a slow process – the recognition.

It wasn’t just any German.

It was Konrad.