The Black Mountains (50 page)

It was strange really that, while the girls should be so level-headed, the boys should be so much at the mercy of their emotions. Not only had Ted fallen in love, body and soul, first with Nipper and then with Rebecca, she was sure that Jack could very well go the same way when at last he opened his eyes for long enough to notice a girl. And Jim, without a doubt, totally worshipped Sarah. Only Harry and Fred were different. She glanced at Harry, absorbed in building a tower with some wooden blocks Dolly and Eric had brought for him, and smiled to herself. She didn't envy the girl who tried to rule him! As for Fred, he was himself, and always would be.

“I had a letter from Fred this week,” she said to Dolly.

“Oh, did you? How is he, Mam?”

“All right, I think. He said he's got a bit of a gyppy tummy, and he wondered if he might be going down with this dysentery. But if he does, at least it'll mean they'll pull him out of the lines until he's better. So I'm living in hopes.”

“Oh, Mam, how can you say that?” Dolly scolded. “ He joined up to fight, after all. And you know what they say out there—if a shell's got your name on it, it'll find you. I mean, look at our Ted. By rights he ought to have been killed several times over. But he wasn't. It wasn't meant to be.”

“No,” Charlotte said, and wondered why she was suddenly full of foreboding.

“Is there any more news, Mam?” Dolly asked, changing the subject.

Charlotte gave herself a little shake. “Well yes, there is, Dolly. You'll never guess what Rosa Clements has done.”

“No, what?”

“Gone off to Bristol to work as a conductress on the buses or the trams, I'm not sure which.”

“Rosa
has?” Dolly repeated, surprised. Rosa had always been so much a country girl, and it was difficult to imagine her in the city.

“Well, somebody's got to do it, with the men all off at the war,” Charlotte said, and she didn't add that she, too, had thought it odd that Rosa, of all people, should have chosen to do her bit in Bristol.

They heard the front-room door open, and James and Dolly's Eric came out, both grinning. “ Well, Dolly, it looks as if I'll be taking you up the aisle on my arm pretty soon then,” James said, and Dolly ran to hug him.

“Oh, Dad, did you say yes?”

“Well, of course, I did,” James said drily. “What good would it have done for me to say anything else?”

They all laughed again, Eric swung Harry up into the air, and for a few minutes, the war seemed far away. Unfortunately, at that very moment, it was a great deal nearer to touching them again than any of them realized.

WHEN Jack had finished his initial course in drill and discipline, he moved on to a training station on the south coast. And there, after less than four hours' dual instruction, he took the Longhorn into the skies for his very first solo flight.

As he climbed into the open cockpit of the flimsy little aeroplane, his heart was thumping wildly, and he was certain he would never be able to remember all he had been told.

The controls were simple enough, it was true—four, or five dials on the dashboard and a joy-stick. But there were so many other things to remember—aerodynamics, meteorology, a whole new language for a whole new world.

“Watch out for the reservoir, chum!” one of the older pilots called out to him jokingly, and he knew what he meant. More than one novice had stalled his engine and ditched in the cold, grey expanse of water that lay just outside the perimeter of the airfield.

“I'll try!” he called back, sounding more cheerful than he felt.

“You'll do better than that, lad!” his instructor yelled at him over the noise of the engine. “And no silly tricks, either. This Longhorn's precious to me. I want her back in one piece!”

Jack gave him a nervous thumbs-up, and then he was off, his heart in his mouth as he gathered speed and rose slowly in the sky like a giant bird. Only when he had cleared the hangars did he relax. As they fell away beneath his wing tips, his nervousness disappeared, and in its place was a tingling exhilaration that ran through his veins like sparkling wine. Beneath him the road was a streamer of light blue-grey, around him the air was still and cold. And he was flying—flying! For all too short a time, he soared and banked, gaining confidence all the time, then it was the moment to bring her down again, and some of his apprehension returned. The landing field looked so small! But, somehow, miraculously, he did it.

“How did I do?” he called, easing himself out of the cockpit once more, and his instructor just laughed. “I wouldn't like to see you have to get away from an enemy aircraft yet Hall. But at least you've brought her down in one piece!” he joked, and Jack knew that, for a first attempt, he was pleased with him.

“Go and have a hot drink to warm yourself up,” he went on.

“Yes, it's cold up there, isn't it?” Jack said, slapping his hands around himself, and the instructor snorted.

“Cold? You don't know what cold is yet! Wait till you've flown in the winter with the drippings from your nose freezing on your lips! It's no joke up there for brass monkeys then, I'll tell you!”

Laughing, Jack went back to the mess. Perhaps it wasn't as cold yet as it would be, but that didn't alter the fact that a warm drink would be more than welcome.

As he went through the door, someone called out to him. “ There's some mail here for you, Jack! A letter from home!”

“Thanks.” He took it and knew from the handwriting it was from Charlotte. He was doing well for mail this week—yesterday there had been a letter from William Davies, keeping him up to date with all the news from his school and congratulating him on passing his Oxford Senior.
Although it would be more of a surprise to me if you
hadn't
passed
, Mr Davies had written.

Now, as he walked through the mess, Jack slit open the envelope from home and glanced at it idly. Then he stopped short. “Fred?” he said aloud in a stunned voice.
“Fred?”

“What's up, then?” one of the older men asked, coming up behind him.

Jack turned, looking at him blankly. “My brother's been killed,” he said in a flat, unemotional voice. Then he looked back at the letter, reading it again.

This will be shock to you, Jack as it is to us all
, Charlotte had written in her heavily rounded hand.
Fred had a bad dose of dysentery as you know and was, or so we thought, safe in hospital behind the lines. But the Germans shelled the hospital. There were twenty or thirty killed there, patients, nurses and doctors. Dr Scott was there, too, or so I heard in town today, but he was only hurt.

But our Fred was killed instantly. I didn't telegraph you, Jack, there didn't seem, any point. He's been buried out there, and I didn't want to worry you with a telegram. We're all in an awful way here, you can imagine. Our Amy is beside herself—she made herself ill with crying and had to come home from Captain Fish's. But like I told her, that won't do any good. We've got to put a brave face on it.

Take care of yourself, my son, and try not to upset yourself too much. We shall all meet again one day, I know we shall. It's just for now it's hard. Write soon. Your ever loving Mam.

He stared at the letter, seeing for the moment, only blackness. Fred dead! And Mam writing about it in this newsy way as if it had nothing much to do with any of them! That was just a cover-up, of course. Beneath all the bravado, she would be shattered. Perhaps he should go to her—ask for leave and go home for a day or two. But she had plenty of people around her. There was nothing more he could do. But he felt strangely disembodied, now. His exhilaration and sense of achievement had been crushed, the hopelessness of it all swept over him.

“There'll be no winners in this war,” he thought bitterly. “ By the time it's over, we'll all be losers, wait and see if we're not!”

Yet, as the numbing shock became grief, he grew more and more determined to do his bit. Every time Charlotte wrote, it seemed, there were more deaths to report, boys he had known all his life. There was Billy Beck, who had been an errand-boy at Fords before his conscription; one of Farmer Brent's boys; and a nephew of Reuben Tapper, the railway porter. And Peggy's Colwyn was in a bad way, too. He had been hit in the head, and although he was still alive, Charlotte said he would never be the same again.

Then, in the summer of 1917, with the wedding fixed for September, Dolly's Eric was killed, and for all her light-hearted approach to life, Dolly was devastated.

“She thought more of him than she ever let on,” Charlotte said to James, and to Jack, she wrote:
It's just one thing on top of another. The Lord only knows where it will all end. You'd think we'd be used to bad news by now, but every time it seems to hit worse. If it goes on much longer, I think I shall be ending up in the asylum.

As soon as he had learned to fly his aeroplane to the satisfaction of his instructor and been trained in bomb-dropping and the use of the Lewis gun, Jack had left Dover for Dunkirk, where he was flying with a force of light bombers and fighters, attacking the harbours, docks and submarine pens along the Belgian coast.

The news from home still disturbed him, but it seemed to be happening at a distance from him. As he flew dawn raids and night stunts, it was the emerald green flashes of the enemy range-finders and the following bursts of anti-aircraft fire that were real, and it was the mates that never came back to the mess who were truly dead—those who were caught in the anti-aircraft fire, or were killed by one of their own bombs that refused to be loosed in spite of frantic stunting over the sea. And the air raids, too, were real, heralded by “Wailing Winnie” and all the other sirens. Then, before their mournful sound had died away, the night would be torn apart by the exploding shells and bombs, and the answering roar of the angry air.

But for all the discomforts and dangers, a year and a half after he first took his Longhorn into the skies, Jack's love affair with flying was as fresh as ever. For him, there was nothing still to compare with the magic of cloud-land, where an aircraft could twist and weave in the banks of soft white cotton wool, nothing to compare with the throb of engine power at take-off, and certainly nothing to compare with the satisfaction of bringing a plane in, bloody but unbowed, at the end of a mission. And sometimes he wondered if, when it was all over, he might stay in the RNAS and make flying his career instead of teaching.

Charlotte would be furious, of course, but after living this way he didn't know if he could ever go back to the life of a schoolmaster, and an ordered routine. The danger and excitement had become too much a part of him—and the comradeship, too. For nothing seemed so bad when there was someone with whom to share it.

That was how it was that morning in January of 1918. There was nothing to warn him that today would be any different from any other. He had lived too long with danger, and had become hardened to it, and it seldom occurred to him now that tonight it might be his own face that was missing from the mess room.

It was a clear morning, frosty and bitterly cold—so cold that as they washed their faces the water froze on the sponges. But as the six bombers with their fighter escort of two took off in formation, everything but the mission ahead was pushed to the back of his mind.

The target this morning was an enemy aerodrome and dump. As they neared the lines, the anti-aircraft fire began, filling the air with shrapnel puffs and scorching holes in the fabric of their fuselage and wings. But none of the de Havillands was seriously damaged, and they dropped through the patchy cloud base to their target in perfect formation.

The line of hangars was there beneath them, grey and squat from this angle, but an easy target, and Jack thought that for a job like this, it should be possible to get a perfect aim even without the guidance of the string ‘reins' the gun-layers used to help them.

The first wave of bombs were loosed and fell through the air like deathly rain. Two hangars erupted into balls of flame, thick black smoke billowing up from a third.

Jack pulled up to follow the formation, but Maurice Kelly, his gun-layer, signalled two bombs left, and reluctantly he turned to go in again. He didn't want to take them home with him. Sitting in their honeycomb bomb racks beneath his wings they were potential death-traps, and there was an enemy aircraft in the middle of the tarmac runway, a sitting duck.

He swooped in, a small smile twisting the corners of his mouth as he saw black beetle-like people scuttling and diving on the ground beneath him. “ I'm not after you,” he whispered. “It's your Albatros I want.” The enemy plane disappeared beneath his wingtips and the bombs had gone, one hitting the tarmac and sinking into it like a spoon in treacle, the other catching the Albatros smack on and shooting splintered wood and burning fabric into a hedgehog arc around the twisted frame.

As he glanced back at it, Kelly held up one thumb to him in a gesture of triumph and momentarily he released his tongue, held tight between his teeth in an effort of concentration throughout the operation. But at that very second they began firing at him from the ground, and his tongue flicked back again as he raised the nose of the de Havilland and pulled up, intent on catching the now straggled formation and tucking into position for a safe run back to base.

This, he thought, was the best part of any mission, the moment when you turned for home, relieved of your bombs, exhilarated by success, drawn by the thought of the warmth and comfort of the mess after the Arctic cold of the skies. Yet there was a tingling awareness, too, that at any moment your luck could run out. It was a thought that ran like a trickle of ice-cold water on skin clammy with sweat, and as it prickled at the back of his mind, Jack flexed his stiff fingers on the controls, consciously forcing himself to relax a little.