I began yearning for every next vehicle to appear from the distance ahead of us and pass with a flood of its headlights. Whenever it happened I turned to Birgit and found her looking towards me. Her eyes were serious and calm, seeking mine with some unstated private message.
The few hours of darkness passed slowly before light began to glimmer against the clouds low on the eastern horizon. Birgit became aware of the coming dawn at the same moment as me, as if realizing that the intimacy of the night would pass with daylight. She leaned even closer to me and placed her hand on mine, where I was holding the steering wheel.
She said, in English, ‘JL, I am most happy to be here with you and Joe.’
I grinned back at her, unwilling to speak in case it brought a response from Joe, hidden behind me. I could see her now, without needing the lights of a passing vehicle to show her to me. She was smiling; a conspiratorial flicker of her eyes towards Joe’s position seemed to confirm my own feelings about not wanting Joe to be a part of it.
She did not remove her hand from mine. I drove on and on, as smoothly as I could, north-west towards Hamburg, savouring every second of the long moment of intimacy with the girl I thought of as the prettiest in the world. Gradually, morning came.
16
I was woken at 6.30 a.m. in my room in the Officers’ Mess at RAF Northolt. I had slept for less than three hours. I forced myself out of bed, reeling with the need to sleep, fighting back the compulsion to stay lying down for a few minutes more. I showered, shaved and dressed, stumbling, dropping things, yawning. I was stiff with fatigue and my leg was aching. Breakfast was the standard RAF fare for non-operational officers: as much toast as I could eat, spread with the yellow gunge the mess called butter but which tasted of fish and was widely rumoured to be refined from the sumps of trawlers.
The car was already waiting for me outside the mess. It was a large black Riley with the crest of the House of Commons imprinted on the doors. A WAAF driver - not the same one as before - was standing beside the passenger’s door. As I approached she stood to attention, saluted smartly and held the door open for me. It had started to rain: a warm but depressing drizzle, slicking down over the roads and trees from a sky the colour of lead.
The WAAF drove swiftly towards central London, expertly negotiating through what little traffic there was.
It was my first visit to London since the early months of 1940, when I had spent a weekend leave with some of the other officers from 105 Squadron. We were in the West End for two nights, carousing our way through the pubs and nightclubs, taking a break from what we thought at the time to be the unspeakable horrors of war. Like most people we had no conception of what was to follow within a few weeks. After the invasion of France and the Low Countries, the Germans were able to move their bomber squadrons to within a short flying distance of the British coast. Every major city in Britain was suddenly within range. For most people the war changed from an anxious time of distant skirmishes to a battle in which they found themselves in the front line. The nightly Blitz had begun in the first week of September 1940 and continued more or less without a break for eight months. London suffered the most, but almost every provincial city was attacked at one time or another. By November, casualties among civilians and rescue workers were numbered in the thousands. One of those killed was my brother Joe, who died when the Red Cross ambulance he was driving in London took a direct hit from a bomb.
Months later, I had still not become reconciled to the shock of his loss.
Today was my first visit to London since the Blitz began. I stared out of the car as we drove to the centre, appalled by the sheer scale of destruction. Everyone in Britain knew the capital had taken a beating during the winter. Even though what the newspapers printed was controlled by government overseers, so as not to give information or encouragement to the enemy, there was enough for most people to gain a pretty vivid idea of what was going on. The weekly newsreels at the cinemas were filled with images of flames, smoke, gutted and collapsing buildings, snaking hosepipes in the roads and torrents of water jetted against the fires.
But to see some of the damage for myself was horrifying. As we drove along Western Avenue I saw street after street where houses had been blown to pieces, where rubble-mountains of brick and plaster and jagged beams of charred wood had been created by the bulldozers. In Acton I saw a whole street that had been destroyed: it was just a rough, undulating sea of broken bricks and other rubble. Windows everywhere were broken, even where there was no other visible damage. There was a pervasive, squalid smelclass="underline" something of drains, smoke, chalk, oil, soot, town gas. Along the main road itself there were many places where the surface had been cratered by an explosion or was being dug up to repair water mains, electricity supplies, telephone connections, gas pipes, sewers. These constant obstacles slowed our progress. In a few places, where the damage was worst and bombed buildings hung perilously awaiting demolition, there were police warning signs, tapes, boards hastily erected to prevent pedestrians from wandering into areas where the paths or the road surface had been undermined. The rain still fell lightly, streaking the car windows with muddy rivulets and creating areas of shallow flooding across the roads and pavements.
We were held up by a large truck blocking the road. Accompanied by a team of workmen, it was reversing slowly into one of the bomb sites. I stared out at the dismal scene, the shattered bricks and pipes lying in the muddy puddles, the filth of charred wood, the glimpses of broken and crushed household items, the pathetic remains of wallpaper visible where inner walls still happened to stand. I tried to imagine what the street must have looked like before the war, when it was full of homes, harmlessly lived in by ordinary people, going about their lives, worrying about money or jobs or their children, but never imagining the worst, that one night their house and all the houses around it would be blown apart by German bombs or incinerated by phosphorus incendiaries.
I also tried to imagine what those former inhabitants must have thought about the men who had bombed their houses, the Luftwaffe fliers, coming in by night. The fury they must have felt, the frustration of not being able to hit back.
I recoiled from the thought. The popular press depicted the Luftwaffe crews as fanatical Nazis, Huns, Jerries, shorthand codes for an enemy impossible to understand, but sense told me that most of the German fliers were probably little different from me and the young men I flew with. Our own bombing missions to Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Kiel, Cologne were no different in kind from the raids that had brought the German bombers here to Acton and Shepherd’s Bush. Today, in Hamburg, there would inevitably be piles of rubble, fractured water mains, homeless children, where A-Able’s high-explosive bombs had fallen.
There was surely a difference, though? What everyone hated about the German raids was that they were indiscriminate, the bombs falling on every part of the cities that were attacked. Women and children were as likely to be killed or injured as soldiers - more likely, indeed, since cities are full of civilians. By contrast, it was repeatedly argued that the British bombing of German cities was a matter of careful targeting, of meticulously chosen aiming points on military installations distant from civilian centres.