Rose Under Fire

Page 5

It must have just happened, or the railway would have already called the unexploded bomb people out to deal with it. The scavenging boy who wanted Rob’s knife was standing there with a shiny cylindrical metal case in his hand. It looked like a soup tin with the paper label missing. And, like he’d said, it was attached by a couple of wires to the inside of the bomb.
‘I’ve got the fuse!’ the boy yelled triumphantly, and then he saw me and Maddie staring at him with our mouths open.
The kid glanced around – there was no place to hide. He reached towards the wires inside the plane as if he was about to yank them free.
Maddie dropped her suitcase and tried to scramble over the wall. ‘Don’t pull! Don’t move! Just hold still –’
I beat her to it. I didn’t have a case, just my flight bag over my shoulder.
‘Don’t drop it –’
Maddie was yelling at me now. ‘Get him to put it down gently! There’s an electrical charge in the fuse and some of them are timed to go off after they’ve landed!’ She made it over the wall and was three steps behind me as we raced across the tracks. ‘That fuse could blow your fingers off on its own, you daft lad, even without being attached to a ton of explosive!’
Then the boy stood very still. He didn’t drop the fuse. He held it out to me across both palms. I remember thinking that this was hugely unfair of God and the universe in general, because now I had to take the fuse. I had got there first and it was mine.
For a moment we were stuck like that, a little boy and a big girl, holding the living heart of a V-1 flying bomb between us.
The silver cylinder had a type number stamped on the cap, and a manufacturer’s name: RHEINMETALL
Incredible to think that someone else’s fingers had fitted this destructive thing together, inserted the fragile switches and connected the wires and screwed on the cap, and now it was balanced ready to blow my own fingers off. Or this boy’s.
I took it from him very carefully.
‘Now scoot,’ I said sadly, because I really thought I was as good as dead.
As he handed it over, the wires simply fell free. They probably had been disconnected the whole time. At least if the fuse went off it wasn’t going to take the bomb with it.
‘Get out of here!’ I yelled at the boy.
He hurtled back across the tracks. As for me, my body acted on behalf of my frozen brain. I wound up for a pitch and hurled the fuse away from the bomb, away from the railway, into the scrubby thin woodland along the tracks.
It hit a beech sapling with a small crack and bang. Bits of bark exploded around the tree, and the trunk sagged – it bent right in half as though it had been caught in a tornado. It wasn’t a very big explosion. But we all saw it. Maddie crouched next to the wreckage of the bomb with her arms over her head, like she’d done in the bus.
I said to her, ‘Come on, Maddie – get away.’
I tugged her across the tracks and over the stone wall. Wouldn’t you know it, I tore my skirt going back over the wall when everything was safe again and not when I was racing to save a kid from blowing himself up! And unbelievably – or very believably, I guess, as my ten years’ experience of being a big sister to those hooligan twins Karl and Kurt ought to have taught me by now – the three boys were still standing there rooted to the spot, staring at the destruction with wide, excited eyes.
‘Would that have gone off in my hand, miss?’
‘How do I know? Maybe! Come on, you’ve got to let the authorities know what you’ve found. Come down to the airfield with us and make a proper report. Get going!’
Maddie pulled herself together and began to herd the boys along the road. ‘Go go go!’
The kids let themselves be bullied now, eyeing me respectfully. ‘You don’t throw like a girl,’ one of them commented.
‘That’s ’cause I played softball at school. Like baseball. Or cricket, sort of – none of us “throw like girls”.’
‘You a Yank?’ asked the boy who’d extracted the fuse, pointing to the ‘USA’ flash on my sleeve.
‘Obviously.’
‘You proud of it?’
Smart aleck.
I had to think about the answer to this question.
‘Yes,’ I said after a moment. ‘Yeah, I am.’
‘That bomb’s dead now, right, miss? A dead doodlebug –’ They all snickered. ‘That’s what the UXB teams do, they take out the fuse –’
I hesitated. I don’t know a lot about bombs. Maddie said, ‘Listen, that dead doodlebug’s still full of TNT, and if that fuse had gone off inside the aircraft, it would have blown you up and probably the rest of us too. What were you doing, playing UXB team?’
‘We saw it come down!’ one of them explained eagerly, and they all broke into grins. ‘We heard it and came running up to the station bridge to watch – Rob had his dad’s field glasses –’
(Crazy kids.)
‘– And we realised it was heading straight for us and we lay right down on the road next to the wall till the noise stopped, because we thought we were dead for sure!’
They were all still completely white around the gills, but they were enjoying themselves more than anything else. Ten-year-old boys are crazy.
We escorted them to the airfield and called out the local Air Raid Precautions warden. He was really nice to the kids, and took them along with him to watch from a safe distance as the road and railway were closed off in preparation for the UXB squad to come along and work their magic.
‘Does your Uncle Roger ever have to deal with unexploded bombs?’ Maddie asked as we watched them go. ‘Isn’t he in the Royal Engineers too, like the bomb squads?’
I never thought about it. I just assumed that all he did was build bridges and dig trenches. Or tell people to do it anyway. I think of Uncle Roger as having a ‘safe’ job.
I got back to the airfield at Hamble in time to pick up the last delivery chit for that evening, a new Spitfire to be delivered to Chattis Hill for testing. It’s only a twenty-minute flight there, but it took me a couple of hours to get back – no more trains and, of course, since I was the last flight of the day, there weren’t any other ferry pilots heading home for me to tag along with. By 10 p.m. the best offer I’d had was from a canteen dishwasher who said I could borrow her bicycle if I brought it back before lunchtime the next day, and I had to bribe her with today’s chocolate ration (you get a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate with every completed ferry flight). I’d already handed it over when a fireman who was going off duty took pity on me and offered me a lift on his motorcycle.
By the time I got home I was absolutely whacked. It was 11 o’clock and I was hungry enough to wolf down one of Mrs Hatch’s awful spam stews (she assures me the veg in it is cabbage and not nettle). Late as it was, she’d very kindly reheated it for me. I fell into bed and thought briefly of Maddie and Jamie, newlyweds too tired to make love; and then I fell asleep too.
I dreamed about the Rheinmetall fuse. I dreamed it detonated in the boy’s hands and blew his fingers off.
It was so vivid – like seeing a moving picture shot in close up. All I could see was the boy’s hands, palms spread, with the silver cylinder lying across them, smooth, round fingertips sticking out just beneath the shining metal, then all of it flying apart. I woke up gasping.
I am spooked by the image. I can’t get it out of my head. I was hoping I could forget it by writing about the wedding – I started out to do a poem, didn’t I? And all I’ve done is write about buzz bombs. I just learned that the TNT mix they use in them is called Amatol. It is a good word, if a bad thing. Perhaps I should try writing poetry about bombs.
Silver tube of fuse and hollow
Cylinder of detonator
Cap and gyro
Blah. It would be good if my heart was in it – like Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’. But I don’t want to think about it. Small smooth fingers blown to bloody bone.
I am determined to do that wedding poem for Maddie. I am afraid it will be inevitably bomb-themed, but I have an idea.
Wartime Wedding
(by Rose Justice. I think this poem is too serious to call it ‘Doodlebug Bride’.)
In a storm of cocktail ice
their silver plane is tossed
from a silver bowl of sky
to a runway rimmed with frost.
The summer evening’s long and cold,
the ground crew shovels snow like glass.
Under their feet the crunching hail
breaks frozen blades of grass.
The house without a roof
seventh along the row
has shed its windowpanes like tears
over the street below.
A woman shovels glass like snow
from the sidewalk as they pass,
under their feet a mirrored hell
of bomb-strewn broken glass.
The dead beloved names
march down the grey and cold
walls of the little church.
He gives her the warm gold.
The loving cup is shared,
the crystal goblet smashed.
Their brave, determined, joyful heels
dance in the broken glass.
It is so hard trying to say what you mean. Of course Maddie and Jamie don’t fly together – I don’t know if they’ve ever flown together – and I’m pretty sure they haven’t been for a walk in London together since the buzz bombs started. But it’s meant to be metaphoric. It never quite comes out the way you want it to, and you always feel it is a little petty to write such floaty stuff about such serious things.
I am going to slam this notebook shut and see if I can raise Nick again on the telephone to plan our Big Date.
August 17, 1944
Hamble
Nick is gone.
We had a wonderful afternoon – he came here and we borrowed the Hatches’ canoe and took it down the Hamble, out into Southampton Water. He brought a bottle of champagne along, booty from one of his secret trips to France, and we drank it on the water. We sort of grazed instead of actually stopping for a picnic – it made the spam sandwiches seem more romantic. We sang camp songs and taught each other rounds. Mine was,
‘My paddle’s keen and bright,
Flashing with silver,
Follow the wild goose flight,
Dip, dip and swing.
Dip, dip and swing her back,
Flashing with silver,
Swift as the wild goose flies,
Dip, dip and swing.’
Nick’s round was,
‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,
Will I ever see thee wed?
I will marry at thy will, sir,
At thy will.’
I refused to sing it until I made him promise it was not a binding contract!
I was in the stern, steering, because he had never been in a canoe. He was a bit of a pill about me being in control – he would not take orders from me at first, and kept trying to stand up when he wanted to point things out, or to climb back to get to the hamper. He can’t swim. I really didn’t want to have to drag him out of Southampton Water before I kissed him goodbye and sent him off to wherever. Why are boys always so sure they’re right about everything?
But I’m not complaining. Because it was so nice. I don’t think I’d have been brave enough to go out into Southampton Water except I knew that Mrs Hatch’s daughter Minna had taken her mother out there a couple of weeks before D-Day, when the harbour and the Solent were PACKED with battleships and landing craft, and they got away with it. We did too. Only one person even bothered to ask what we were up to – everyone else just waved and laughed. I guess the picnic hamper and the bottle of champagne were appropriate non-spy accessories. Nick was wearing his RAF blues and I had on a flowery summer top I’d borrowed from Felicyta and we were clearly on a date.