Tuesdays war, p.43
Tuesday's War, page 43
‘Yeah. Fergal told me last night.’
‘Funny that. I always thought that the Swissies were a peace-loving folk.’
‘Quelch always brought out the worst in people.’
It took the rest of the day to sort ourselves out. We found a few bottles of beer and finished them. Marty took the Red Indian motorbike, and Fergal the Austin Seven. I got the Singer because everyone thought I had been given a tough deal. Grease gave everyone an embarrassing hug – he had movement orders for a train to Liverpool, and then an old trooper to Halifax NS. He should have been excited to be going home, and out of the way of the bullets forever, but it doesn’t work like that. Marty was funny: it turned out that he’d stolen a pocket bible from a hotel and he’d carried it with him on every trip. He got us all to sign our names on the flyleaf. Then he gave it to Fergal. Grease got us to sign the slim pilot’s notes booklet he had filched from Quelch. We signed under where Quelch had neatly printed his own name in brown ink. Nobody said anything about Pete: his name wasn’t even mentioned. We made plans for that meeting at Betty’s in York, where we promised Grease we’d scratch his name on the mirror downstairs with the other Canadians. Nobody believed it would happen.
The goodbyes were drawn out, as we left the Pit in ones and twos. I was the last. I went round all the beds, and left the sheets and blankets folded to regulation squares at their feet. I banked the stove up, drew the curtains around number eight, and left it all without a glance back. I didn’t dare. I locked its unique little storm porch – the clothes hooks were empty apart from Pete’s greatcoat, and I couldn’t bear to move that – and handed in the key at the guardhouse where they checked my movement orders. They had been signed by someone I had never met. There was a new Bluto there: he shook my hand and wished me luck. I had two weeks’ leave before joining my new squadron, and actually made the decision as I drove out through the gate: I turned north for Glasgow and the old man, with the sun somewhere behind me. I suddenly remembered that it was Wednesday: we had had our party on Tuesday. Goodbye, Tuesday.
Epilogue
I’m writing these last few words sitting in the garden. It’s early autumn: I always dream about Germany in the autumn. I have an aluminium folding table to write on, and an aluminium and nylon folding chair. In 1944 nylon was something which covered a girl’s legs, and which your hand ran over on its way to getting lucky. At these northern latitudes the sun is often hard and bright and hot in the autumn, after it has burned the dew from the grass. The long grey house is behind me, and fields and rough pasture in front of me run down to the Scotsburn road. I can clearly see the remains of the Tain airfield where Dougie built the huge runways on the way to his first million. What goes around, comes around. Beyond that I can see the sunlight bouncing off the sea in the Dornoch Firth.
The old lady brought me my morning whisky just now, and said, ‘Look. You have company again.’
Glancing to my right I see a man leaning against the Wellingtonia, which is the nearest of the great trees to the buildings. It is at the edge of the tunnel of rhodies that leads to the wilderness of trees and ruined Victorian garden that dwarfs the house. I have seen him many times before. He wears a long leather flying jacket and riding trousers; an old soft leather flying helmet and goggles hang from one hand. We get older, but he doesn’t, and he seems to stand closer to me these days.
Falling in Love with Emily, and a Little History
Anyone with an Ordnance Survey map of the Cambridgeshire– Bedfordshire border, and half a brain, can identify the villages at the centre of Charlie’s story, their airfields, churches and pubs . . . and anyone with access to a car can visit the places he describes in a day.
The airfield at Twinwood Farm north of Bedford has lost its runway, but its watch office, sheds, offices, accommodation and Blister hangars are said to comprise the most complete World War Two airfield left in the UK: some of it is listed. The watch office has recently been refurbished, and can be visited. Thurleigh was taken back by the Brits after the war, and became a flight-testing establishment with a huge new runway . . . but you can pick up the contours of the 1944 USAAF base from the map, and around its periphery you can find many forties buildings, including the Snake Pit on the Backnoe road. You can lunch at the Jackal, and from it walk the footpath north along the fringes of the fields and stream until you reach the airfield. The site of the ARC Officer’s Club in Bedford is now a car park at the junction of Kimbolton and Goldington roads, although the box-like building you can see at its eastern edge was once its boiler room. In the Eagle in Cambridge you can still read the names burned on to the ceiling. Grease is up there somewhere.
There is a maze in the church at Bourn, and it’s not that difficult to find, neither are the houses which used to be the pubs. They still fly from Bourn airfield, but it is a fraction of its former size: you need to walk the surrounding fields to find the mouldering station buildings. Most of the main runway, including the ‘hump’ is there, and recently the Dutch air force returned the pieces of a Lancaster which set out from Bourn in January 1944 but got no further than Amsterdam: home at last. It was also the airfield which lost a squadron to the fog.
In Everton you will find a perfect English village churchyard, overlooking what is left of Tempsford airfield. There is a short row of RAF graves, and another which may make you smile. The Thornton Arms at Everton serves the best beer south of Edinburgh, and you can walk from it down the sunken track the RAF crews used, to the airfield on the plain below. Many of the RAF buildings, one still disguised as a wooden barn, remain there, as does a section of the short east/west runway and the perimeter track. If you want to see the main runway it shows as an immense mark in the crops twice a year.
Glenn Miller didn’t make it. He and his pilot, John R. S. Morgan, famously disappeared on a flight from Twinwood Farm to Orly in mid-December 1944 in that Norseman Glenn so disliked. Stories of his reappearance surface from time to time – like Elvis pumping gas at a way station in Alaska – but none of them ever seem to come to much. The most recently accepted theory is that the aircraft was flying low over an area of the English Channel cleared for the ditching of unused bombs, when it met a Lancaster flight coming the other way for exactly that purpose, and that the bombs dropped from the Lancasters overwhelmed the small aircraft.
Charlie was as wrong about Lee Miller as he was about most of the women he met in his twenties. Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful women in the world in the 1920s – you can see the nude studies made by her father, and Man Ray – she walked away from the war and much of her photography at the same time, having run through to the Axis surrender and beyond. Her powerful photographs of the liberation of the concentration camps are often the ones you see in the history books these days. In 1946, exhausted, she took a conscious decision to rebuild her relationship with her husband, the English surrealist Roland Penrose, and rarely – apart from taking images of visiting artists, family and friends – picked up a camera again. The Penroses’ English farm became a haven for a new generation of European artists, and was a springboard for the renaissance of modern art in the UK in the fifties: it is always likely that the wonderful gouts of colour you see in galleries around you today began there. Then she wrote a cookery book that redefined the standard for cookery books thereafter. Forget Delia and Nigella; Charlie would say, ‘What goes around, comes around’ – there’s nothing new under the sun. My favourite Lee Miller story tells that she was in the van of the allied troops descending on Paris in August 1944, and while the other war correspondents fussed around de Gaulle and the other high-ranking military officers, she sloped off to find her pre-war artist friends. In the thirties she had sat for Picasso, and when she made it back to his studio in her army uniform, Pablo hugged her and said, ‘This is the first Allied soldier I’ve seen, and it’s you!’ I wish that I had been there. There was only one limited exhibition of her photographs in her lifetime, and that was before the war. It wasn’t until after her death that a major touring exhibition of her work in 2001 really woke us up to the fact that a goddess with a camera had walked among us for a while.
I saw Lee’s friend Dave Scherman interviewed in a documentary about her a couple of years ago. His once black hair was wavy and iron grey, and his eyes twinkled with humour. He looks like a half-scale retired lumberjack, still a ladykiller, and is full of good stories: I hope that he is still around.
Braddock won his VC, and flew his way into the hearts of generations of schoolboys in the fifties and sixties through the pages of the Wizard and the Hotspur.
At Madingley, near Cambridge, there is an American Forces cemetery. I think that there are about 4,500 folk lying there: the ones who never went home. I first wandered in by accident late one autumn afternoon, and the words my mother had so often used to describe the Americans to me sprang into my mind: overpaid, oversexed and over here! I wished immediately that she had still been alive, and that I could show her the monstrous hill of white crosses, and say, Yes; and some of them are still here. War costs: they paid. You should make a visit, if you haven’t already; it’s the perfect antidote to a war museum. On the wall dedicated to the memory of the unburied dead you will find the names of Alton Glenn Miller, and his pilot John Morgan.
And you can find Emily there. Charlie was wrong about Emily Rea too: not only did she know Glenn Miller, but was close enough to him to be chosen to present his major’s oak leaves when he was promoted from captain. In return he gave her his captain’s bars as a keepsake. All they could find of Emily to bury was her hipbone: that and her purse, in which they found Glenn Miller’s captain’s bars. They all went down into the grave together.
Emily Harper Rea was born in Madison, Indiana, on 25 October 1911, and educated at Madison High School and Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana. There are traces of her still in the school yearbooks of the period. Her first job was in a bank, but she went on to become the PA to two state governors in turn. She joined the American Red Cross as a staff assistant in January 1943, and worked in the ARC Officers’ Club in Bedford as a senior staff assistant in 1944. She got a posting to Paris, where she was programme director at the ARC Grand Central Club in Paris from late 1944 through to 1945. I might have misplaced her in the Bedford club in September and October of 1944; who knows, perhaps she was revisiting old haunts? Unmarried at thirty-three – a little unusual in the forties – she seems to have made an immediate positive impact on all who met her. One old USAAF man from Thurleigh remembers her as ‘mother, kid sister and girlfriend’ all rolled into one, and ‘one of the very best’.
She was killed as a passenger on Combined Operations, a B-17 that crashed on the Isle of Man on 14 April 1945 in thick weather, just nineteen days before the end of the war in Europe. The war-weary but serviceable bomber was on a flight between Thurleigh and Langford Lodge in Ireland. Langford Lodge was an R&R destination for the US forces, and it is probable that most of the five crew and six passengers were on the flight for a few days’ escape from the war. The reason for Emily’s presence on the flight is less clear: two theories have been put to me, but neither has been easily verifiable. The least plausible makes the best story. Emily left Paris on leave a few days before the announcement of the death of President Roosevelt. She spent a few days in London with friends, before moving up to Bedford and Thurleigh to be among the folk she knew best. A story goes that she was on the flight to Langford Lodge to catch an onward transatlantic connection to Washington for a memorial service to the dead president; one of the few Americans brought home from Europe for it because of her acquaintanceship with the president from her days as PA to politicians. Several of the dead from Combined Operations were buried at Madingley, and moving contemporary photographs show hundreds of distressed service and civilian mourners, most of whom were there for Emily: her coffin is a small mountain of flowers. Among the personal letters of condolence received by Emily’s parents was one from one Mrs Michael Bowes-Lyons, an aunt of the present queen. The written and oral memoirs of those servicemen who met her are shot through with affection: it is almost as if it was impossible for someone to know her, and not fall a little in love with her.
Sleep well, Emily. Hang on tight to the captain’s bars; you earned them.
DAVID FIDDIMORE was born in 1944 in Yorkshire and is married with two children. He worked for five years at the Royal Veterinary College before joining HM Customs and Excise, where his work included postings to the investigation and intelligence divisions. Tuesday’s War is the first in a proposed trilogy featuring Charlie Bassett.
First published 2005 by Pan Books
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Copyright © David Fiddimore 2005
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David Fiddimore, Tuesday's War
