The Buried Circle (33 page)

Some nights I was on fire-watching duty at the hospital, up on a cold rooftop waiting for the bombers’ drone. Rest of the time, if the bus wasn’t cancelled because of an air raid, I went home to Avebury. As the blacked-out bus lumbered out of the town, its shaded headlamps casting only a faint gleam on the road ahead, sometimes there’d be lights on the hills.

Davey knew what was up there. Hush-hush, mum’s the word. One of his mates at the airbase had helped build a dummy town on the top of the Downs near Barbury, a burning ghost to fool the bombers and lure them away from Swindon and the railway yards. There were other decoys on the hills around: fake airfields called Q-sites, runways with goose-necked flares that no plane ever took off from.

Sometimes, when he was driving me home, we parked up under Hackpen Hill, near the White Horse that the grass’d been allowed to grow over, to stop the bombers using him as a landmark. Along the ridge in the moonlight were the chalk ramparts of the old hillfort at Barbury Castle. Funny to think it’d been built thousands of years ago, by men with spears and bows and arrows; now it held an anti-aircraft battery.

‘I’m going away,’ said Davey. ‘I’m being transferred to Scotland. Training for air crew.’ It was the spring of ‘41, awful dark in the car, but the moon was up, showing he’d taken off his forage cap and was twisting it in his hands. He never tried to kiss me now. I felt sorry for him; I should have let him be, so he could find another girl who would love him back properly, but he seemed happy enough to be with me.

‘What for?’ I said stupidly. Obvious, really: the Battle of Britain had been won, by the skin of Mr Churchill’s teeth, but a lot of young men had gone with it. The RAF needed new flyers. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t be a pilot.’ There were tears pricking my eyes. Didn’t usually get sentimental, but there’d been a bowl of cider punch at the dance and I’d had a few glasses.

‘Fed up of being an erk. I’m going to be a navigator.’

‘I’m surprised they’re letting you,’ I said. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight as he whipped round and glared. ‘That come out wrong. Meant to say, you’re too good a mechanic to lose.’

‘They’re training
girls
to be mechanics now. Bleedin’ heck, one turned up in the Air Transport Auxiliaries the other day–pilot trained. She’s going to be flying planes across country to deliver to the bases. Can’t have them flying missions, though, can they? Men still the only ones can do that. Anyway, the brass seem to think I have an
aptitude!
He laughed. An aptitude for altitude.’

‘Yes, but…what’d you know about navigation?’

‘That’s why I’m learning.’

‘Star charts and dead reckoning?’

‘It’s cleverer than that these days. There’s a thing they call AI–airborne interception–shouldn’t tell you, because it’s hush-hush, but that’s what I’m off to learn in Scotland. I already did a radio direction-finding course at Yatesbury.’

He’d kept mighty quiet about that. Yatesbury, where I’d sat in the churchyard with Mr Cromley, specialized in training for wireless and signals. It was so close to Avebury that some of the officers stationed there had made their living quarters on a caravan site behind Rawlins’s garage. The bar of the Red Lion was stuffy with their pipe smoke and beer fumes.

A navigator. Davey had always been a clever boy, good with maps, good with the size and shape and lay of things. But clever boys still got killed. Not much that brains could do to stop a line of tracer coming through the skin of a Wellington or a Beaufighter and splatting them.

Wasn’t much I could do, was there? If I’d begged, wouldn’t have stopped him.

‘You got a death wish,’ I said. ‘Or worse. You any idea what I see on the wards every day? Air crew without faces. Bald and shiny as babies, their pretty ears and noses burned away, eyes gummy slits. Want to end up like that?’

‘Ninety-six out of every hundred planes come back safe. Chances are…’

‘That’s what the body-snatchers at Bomber Command tell the lambs. You can work all sorts of fakery with numbers. Chances are
terrible
. Average plane lasts seventeen ops. You know that–you send the bloody things out factory fresh and get ‘em back in bits. Like I get the airmen.’ Now all he showed me was the back of his head, every prickle on his close-barbered neck sulking.

‘When are you going?’ I asked.

‘Monday’

‘Monday?
This
Monday?’

‘Tonight’s goodbye.’

It was my turn to look out of the window; couldn’t think of anything to say. The hedges on either side of the car were dripping with may blossom. He pressed the starter button and the engine caught. Made a sound like the end of the world, that car, with the heavy vibrating piece of steel on the roof shattering the peace of the night. He rammed it into gear, and it bumped forward on the pocked road surface. A bit up the lane was a gateway where he usually turned the car round.

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go home yet.’

He put his foot on the brake, and the car came to a juddering halt.

‘Fran. You know they got a word for girls like you?’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ I said. ‘Take me up to where your city of lights is.’

The car bounced along the ruts of the Ridgeway towards Barbury, its steel roof creaking and groaning. It hadn’t rained for a while and the track was solid, though winter had been wet and cold. Below us lay the airfield at Wroughton, a great dark hidden thing, no lights showing from its camouflaged hangars where planes slept in their maintenance cradles. Davey stopped at the bottom of the slope leading up to Barbury.

‘Are we there?’

‘It’s a bit further. Have to walk the rest–don’t want anyone to hear us coming or we might be shot as spies.’

‘You joking?’ The cooling engine ticked in the silence. ‘Love-a-duck, you’re
not!

‘Still keen to see it?’

‘Try and stop me.’

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Path’ll be hobbledy-gobbledy’

‘I can manage.’ I was in dance shoes, ankle straps and platform soles, but if I had to I’d go barefoot on the grass.

‘Don’t blame me if you break a leg.’

I opened the car door and got out. It was a warm spring night, hardly a breeze, half a moon. ‘Where is it? Can’t see any lights.’

‘They won’t be lit unless there’s a raid on the way. This way.’ He set off, a faint stocky moon shadow trailing his back. We climbed the path; I kept my eyes on the ground, watching where I placed my feet, pretending I was a hind picking her delicate way across tussocked ground.

A shadow loomed out of the darkness: a Nissen hut.

‘Are we there?’

‘Sssh. That’s where the crew will be.’

‘There are people up here? In’t that dangerous? Don’t they get bombed?’

‘Course they get bombed. But somebody has to be here to start the fires. There’s an underground bunker beneath; protects them from anything other than a direct hit. But you’re right, it in’t the most popular duty.’

‘Did you ever have to do it?’

‘Still do, some nights.’ No wonder he wasn’t scared to be a navigator.

The ground had levelled out. Davey put a finger to his lips. We came round the end of a bank of earth, and there it was.

It was the bones of a city, in the moonlight, stretching half a mile or more across the Downs. No buildings, apart from the Nissen hut we’d passed; only spindly frames of pipework, a giant Meccano set. Every so often, a taller scaffolding tower rose twenty feet into the air, supporting pairs of square tanks. The place was utterly silent.

‘Welcome to the Starfish.’

‘Starfish?’

‘No idea. That’s what they call the decoy towns. Maybe starfish glow in the dark.’

‘I don’t understand how the Germans don’t know it’s here. They must fly over it in the day sometimes.’

‘If you saw it from above, it’d look like chicken sheds or farm buildings.’

And from down here? Set me in mind of Mr Cromley’s soul traps.

‘Mind where you’re putting your feet,’ said Davey. ‘Don’t want to trip over they feed troughs.’

They did look like feed troughs–long shallow iron baskets filled with something dark.

‘What’s in them?’

‘Coke and coal. Wood chippings, sawdust, brushwood underneath, soaked in oil’

‘What are the tanks for?’

‘That’s the clever bit. One’s full of oil, the other of water. When the fire baskets are alight, the men in the bunker can trigger the tanks to flush–a bit like a WC cistern. The flames go up to thirty foot.’ He sounded so proud you’d have thought he’d designed it himself.

‘And the water puts them out again?’

‘No, no. The opposite. It
explodes
. You seen a fire in a chip pan? Try putting that out with water.
Whoomph
. Steam, flames shooting to high heaven everywhere. Makes Jerry think one of his pals has just dropped a bomb, so in he comes for his own bombing run. With luck the blokes on the anti-aircraft battery pick him off, but doesn’t matter anyway, see, ‘cause he’s dumping his bombs on a bit of nowhere.’

Everything was so quiet; hard to imagine this silent place lit by fire and explosions. In the distance, a ewe called to its lamb. I stepped cautiously over one of the long troughs.

‘Hey, hang on, Fran,’ said Davey. That’d warm your knickers. I shouldn’t–’

‘I want to explore.’

‘It isn’t a good idea. You don’t know what might be over the horizon.’

‘Come on. It’s late, only a bit of old moon. There won’t be a raid.’

‘I don’t know. These days, bombers don’t need a full moon to find their way. And if they come, remember, it’s all remote control. There’s electric detonators in those troughs, wired back to the bunker. The blokes in the hut can’t see us–and, anyway, they wouldn’t hold off if they could.’

I felt reckless. On Monday Davey would be gone, my protection against the world; all I’d have left would be the airmen without faces. ‘Come on,’ I repeated. He shook his head.

‘‘Tisn’ safe, Fran’.

‘Thought you was going to be a bold brave airman.’

‘I mean not safe for you. Look at those daft shoes you’re wearing.’

‘Not so daft I can’t run in them.’ I jumped over the next fire basket, off like one of the racehorses Davey used to ride out on when he worked at the stables.

‘Fran…’ I could hear him following, feet thudding on the chalky ground. One of the scaffold towers with its square tank loomed above me. I ducked under it. Hide and seek. Heard him run past. I ran out and across the middle of the ghost city, playing hopscotch over the fire baskets. The troughs and pipes seemed to spread all over the top of the Downs and I ran up a little rise to see if it continued beyond, where the ridge of chalk ran on northwards…

There was a glow. Flames on the skyline.

‘Davey!’ I could hear the panic in my own voice. ‘Davey, looks like Swindon…’

His voice was a way off. ‘What was that?’

‘Swindon’s getting it.’

‘Don’t be soft. We’d have heard the bombers go over. You’re confused, must be Bristol getting it again…’

Bristol was to the west. I was looking north. Or–

The chalk fell away to the north, down to the plain. I must be facing eastwards then. Not Swindon. Not Bristol. So what was burning?

The night was still silent, apart from us. Faintly, at some distance, I heard a telephone ring.

‘FRAN! Move it. Get out, get away from the fire baskets…’

Where was Davey? I couldn’t see him. All around me, a vast grid of troughs and pipes and tanks. The telephone still ringing. Then it stopped.

Paralysed, didn’t know which way to go.

‘Those fires are Liddington, Fran. It’s the next Starfish along. Bombers must be coming from the east.’ Davey was somewhere a long way off to my right, a shadow among shadows. ‘MOVE. They’ll be igniting the fires any minute.’

I started running, hoping it was back the way I’d come, hoping that was the quickest way out of this maze, trying to dodge away from the fire baskets, though if they lit them and flushed the oil and water so the flames exploded I’d be incinerated anyway, a black charred thing like I’d once seen an airman’s hand when they brought him in, with deep pink oozing cracks in it. They couldn’t give those boys enough morphine. They screamed themselves to sleep, the nurses said.

Had to get a grip. If I thought about burning I’d have to give up, sink down where I stood…MOVE it, I told my feet in them silly shoes. Take them off? No time. Had to run. It was no good, the place was a maze, if I tried running round the fire baskets it’d take all night–I had to jump over them…

Couldn’t do it. Came to a halt, teetering. What if I jumped just as the detonator went off? All I could think was what Davey’d said when I first set off into the Starfish–
That’ll warm your knickers
. I could feel a long, tight scream building up inside me. Had to do it, had to jump. Couldn’t, couldn’t.

Then RUN. I ran along the length of the fire basket, round the end of it, down the length of another one looking for the next gap. My ankle went over, I was on hands and knees with my nose an inch from the ironwork. I could smell the sawdust, the creosote and the oil on top. If it went up now I’d be a candle, a flaming head on a melting body, my eyes running down my cheeks as they seared and split…

I screamed, screamed again, and it was such a tiny sound in the immensity of the darkness. Had to get up. Had to get AWAY…I was clawing myself backwards away from the trough like an upended spider, legs tangling, and oh, God, the pain in my ankle, a deep sick-making pain but nothing, nothing like the pain of burning up would be.

There were arms under my arms, lifting me up. God, lift me up so I could float away, a flake of ash on the smoky wind spiralling upwards.

A red light flashed about fifty feet away.

‘Sweet Jesus, what’s that?’

‘Railway signal light.’ Davey’s voice, close by my ear.

‘Where did you come from?’ Oh, the relief. Not to be alone.

‘Never you mind. Can you put your weight on your ankle?’

‘What’s a railway signal light doing up here? Don’t tell me I’m going to be made mincemeat by a train next?’ I tried a step forward. Still sick-making, but possible, at a lurch. One shoe had come off, the strap torn on a piece of flint when I’d tried to crawl away from the trough. My leg was scraped and bleeding.