When We Fall Read online

  ‘Sonia.’

  Vee’s hand folds over her friend’s. She cannot think of a single thing to say. Sonia’s mouth smiles although her eyes are dull as death.

  ‘That was Tony’s father. Just confirming the arrangements. I’ll motor over there on Sunday.’

  ‘Shall I come with you, Sonia? At least as a passenger. It’s a damned nuisance not being able to drive or I’d offer…’

  ‘No, no. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Are you sure? What about today? What are you going to do with yourself?’

  ‘Get my chit, of course.’

  Vee frowns. ‘You’re flying? Today?’

  ‘I have to. I’d feel even more ghastly if I couldn’t fly.’

  Vee shakes her head but cannot bring herself to say anything else.

  From the corner of the corridor ceiling, the Ops tannoy blares:

  ‘Hello, hello, attention please. Taxi Anson 9972 waiting outside for pilots: Thompson, Estes, Hurworth, Katchatourian and Cheng.’

  ‘That’s you, Vee.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on. Don’t keep them waiting.’

  Outside, the wind is brisk but the vis is telescope sharp. Cotton-wool clouds dot the porcelain sky. As she heads towards the Anson, Vee feels alert to every detail; the mechanic wiping oily hands on his overalls, the yellow Tiger Moths lined up like ducklings at a fair, the red cross on the ambulance that sits at the ready by the landing strip.

  Suddenly, Vee is glad, no, she is overjoyed that Stefan has gone out of her life. Because it would be completely ridiculous to end up like Sonia and be madly in love with a dead man. Now Vee is free. And if she ends up ripping the brand new Spitfire into the ground, the loss of the aircraft will be the only thing that really matters. No one will mind too much about losing a third-rate Third Officer.

  She waits on the grass behind Mike Thompson, drumming her fingers against her bag as he hauls his tall frame on to the wing and through the Anson’s low door. Vee follows, stooping into the cabin as her eyes adjust to the light.

  ‘Budge up!’

  Jimmy Cheng, a burly New Zealander, is right behind her. Vee shuffles away from the door so that he can get by. Then he sees her face and looks aghast.

  ‘Hey, miss, you feeling all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You look a bit…’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Vee sits on the narrow metal bench and pulls the straps tight. She will not admit, even to herself, that everything in her life recently has gone too far, too fast. Only three months ago, she couldn’t fly at all; only a month ago, she had never been in love.

  The fuselage wall thrums against Vee’s head as the Anson accelerates across the grass. She grabs the edge of the bench and closes her eyes. Wheels shake before they give up the ground with a thump. Despite the straps, Vee imagines herself floating, weightless up into the sparse cabin.

  She opens an eye and Jimmy Cheng’s head is bent towards his neighbour in an earnest exchange but he is looking straight at Vee. They must think her ridiculous, clinging on to the bench like this during a perfectly comfortable take-off. If she is to fly a Spit, she must at least pretend to be all right. And if she does not fly the Spitfire today, she might as well give up on being a pilot for good.

  Vee takes a breath as deep as she can manage and reaches into her overnight bag. The covers of her Ferry Pilots Notes are dog-eared and grubby. But the Spitfire Mark IX page is clean. Vee does her best to commit the instructions to memory:

  ‘… oil pressure gauge – 30LBS; air screw control lever – FORWARD; fuelcock levers – UP…’

  She knows all this off by heart but the words seem to have no meaning.

  Beyond the Anson’s cockpit windows, the pale sky is islanded with white clouds. On the horizon, above Birmingham’s forest of tiny chimneys, the brown smog is studded by a glitter of defensive balloons.

  Vee knows there is something missing from the Notes, something that Sonia had said about take-off in a Spit. An important piece of advice. Was it something about swapping hands from throttle to undercarriage lever? She could ask Jimmy but he now seems engrossed in a comic. And asking anything would make her look even more pathetic than she probably already does. They would not be surprised. They probably think that she has never been quite up to scratch as a pilot, even for a woman.

  The Anson tilts away from the sun and Vee twists her neck with a crack of tense muscles. There, below, is the Vickers-Armstrong factory with its vast furrowed roofs and concrete roadways; a small rectangular city surrounded by fields. Between a giant hangar and the bleached X of landing strips, miniature Spitfires are tied down in earthbound battle formation. And one of them must be MK355.

  Jimmy hardly looks up from The Wizard as Vee leaves the plane, and on the ground everything feels a little firmer. In the factory aerodrome office, the sergeant on the movements desk is pleasant and brisk. He seems unsurprised that Third Officer Katchatourian is not a man and as he signs her chit, he explains in detail where she will find the aircraft and he even kindly points the way to a ladies’ room. This is not a thing Vee has ever found before in an RAF station or maintenance unit. She usually has to go to the gents double quick.

  This factory lav even has a dish with real soap in it and Vee takes a long sniff of her hands as she washes them. Then she looks at herself in the mirror. Her skin is dull and spotty; her hair has not been washed for more than a week. She looks like a disappointment to herself as her mother would say. Neither of her parents is as proud of her as they should be. Being a ferry pilot is too out of the ordinary for them to comprehend fully what a remarkable thing it is that Vee has achieved. If this flight goes wrong, they will mourn her bitterly, but they might also feel vindicated. Flying certainly did turn out to be much too dangerous a job for a girl.

  MK355 glints with fresh paint and unscratched Perspex. The ground staff are polite, telling Vee not to worry about a puff or two of smoke from cowlings on account of all the new grease in the engine. And it’s not called a ‘Spitfire’ for nothing! they say.

  Despite her foreboding, excitement sparks through Vee’s stomach as she presses her parachute into the seat and herself on top of it. Instrument dials glisten. With the initial checks done, Vee shouts Clear! and presses the starter button. A blast from the propeller-engine punches her face and as she breathes in the smoke and noise, she is filled with a sudden lightness. She knows exactly what to do to fly this plane, and must now prove to everyone, including herself, that she can.

  Hydraulics, down; booster pump, on; pressures and temperatures rising. Vee pulls the lever by her feet to release the brakes and the Spit jumps forward. She looks over her shoulder. Both of the mechanics are pressing their weight on to the tail. Vee edges the Spit forward, her feet on the rudder pedals, coaxing a zig-zagging path that allows her to see to each side of the plane’s high nose. As wheels bump on to the glaring expanse of concrete, the nose lists down as the men riding on the tail leap off.

  Throttle forward. A heavy hand of air pushes Vee against the seat as the Spit accelerates. Concrete, grass, factory buildings are all passing in a blur. And then, the nose begins to sink. Even though she knows that this is what always happens when the tail wheel rises from the ground, Vee’s stomach lurches. The sense of an impending somersault runs a drip of sweat into her eye. She looks for a second across the wing and a distant yellow windsock is underneath it. So the Spitfire must be in the air.

  Vee holds tighter to the steel ring that tops the control column and eases it back. Up, up; easily, joyfully. Never has an aeroplane felt more at home in its element. Higher, higher. The Spitfire is cushioned by the air. Falling is inconceivable.

  Vee suddenly remembers Sonia’s advice to wait before switching hands from throttle to control column to undercarriage lever. And once the wheels have flipped into the body of the plane, it glides ever
faster in a glorious, roaring symphony.

  The altimeter needle teeters in the dial. Two thousand feet. Woolly clouds are not far above. Their curving undersides seem even more solid close up. It is hard to believe, this near, that she could fly through them, almost as easily as through air.

  Vee sees then, in a moment of cold-front clarity, that she was stupid to pin any hopes on to Stefan. He is in love with someone else; someone who may be out of reach, but he cannot let her go. Vee will not let herself fall into the same trap. She will forgive Stefan for abandoning her if that is what he has done. And if she lives long enough, she will forget him.

  Up ahead, a low cloud, bulbous as a cauliflower, sits directly in the Spitfire’s path. Vee glances at the panel. Two hundred miles an hour. The correct cruising speed but faster than she has ever travelled, or might ever travel again. The cauliflower cloud is advancing headlong and Vee knows that she should avoid the uncertain turbulence of its interior. The dense white vapour looms. And before there is time to change course, Vee is swallowed by whiteness.

  Autumn 1943

  Cumulus

  Rounded white clouds scattered across the sky and in constant movement. Associated with fine weather but may develop into cumulonimbus, the towering black clouds that produce lightning and violent storms.

  Posen, Greater German Reich

  Monday 4 October

  Ewa knows she is getting reckless. Not with anything too serious but in the accumulation of small risks. Like this morning. The lodgers all left with the noisy excitement of boys on their way to a football match. It was something to do with the conference at the Castle but she lacked the interest to listen properly as they prattled about it through mouthfuls of breakfast ham. She had no doubt though that today they would be entirely preoccupied with events outside the guest house. The thought gave her an adrenalin-fuelled shiver of excitement. And so she has allowed herself to be sitting on her bed, at ten thirty in the morning in full daylight, with the noiseless typewriter and a list of planned ethnic resettlements.

  The work absorbs her. She turns each handwritten page, stomach skipping with apprehension in case she recognises the address of someone she knows too well; a school friend or a distant relative of her mother’s, someone she would have to warn about what was coming. And such a warning would be very much more than a small risk.

  Suspicion could so easily be roused. Even on the day of an expulsion, if the household lacks its radio and blankets or the kitchen is without any pans or knives, the question ‘Who told you?’ will arise. It would be screamed, in fact, by policemen speaking bad Polish. And Ewa could not really blame any evicted family for saying the name of the woman who had tipped them off. Thankfully though, there has so far been no one on the lists worth that risk.

  It has not taken Ewa long to become a trusted member of the Resettlement Office team. In the summer, endless swaddled peasants, speaking a language that only their dogs and Bulgarian neighbours would recognise as German, had flowed westward. These borderland Volk are coming partly because they have heeded, patriotically, the Führer’s call to populate the Reichsgau Wartheland with Germans. At least that is what the newsreels say. But mainly they are coming, in ever-increasing numbers, because they are not stupid. The Soviets are on the advance. And anything remotely German that gets in their way, even schnauzers and dachshunds Ewa has heard, will not live to meet more than one Red Army soldier.

  When Ewa turned up to volunteer, Frida, who runs the Resettlement Office, was beginning to despair. Where were all of these new settlers to go? The Bessarabians all wanted farms, but they had already been snapped up. Only city apartments were left, and these, especially in their nasty post-expulsion condition, were not popular. We must make them nicer, Ewa suggested. Provide the new occupants with a hot meal, and flowers perhaps. Frida had smiled. Most of the other Resettlement girls were hearty Party types from the Alt Reich but Frida seemed delighted with Ewa’s quiet domestic efficiency. And Ewa is now trusted with administration too. It will not be long until she is drawing up the eviction schedule herself and deciding which apartments, currently lived in by Poles, are required for ‘German’ settlers.

  Downstairs, the back door bangs over a hail of men’s voices. Ewa’s fingers hover over the hollow keyboard. The carriage return is embossed with letters: REMINGTON NOISELESS PORTABLE. She has no idea what the words mean. The machine must be English or American and she can only guess where Haller got it. Her fingers again trip silently over the keys. There are a few more dates and addresses to add before this copy will be done. The liaison girl who will take it is only working on the flower stall until noon.

  Did one of the voices below shout for her? Perhaps an officer has come back for something and needs to speak to Ewa about dinner arrangements. Her meal plan for the week is already messed up; it was only yesterday when most of them said that they were likely to be out each evening. And then, of course, there is the Gauleiter’s dinner on Saturday. Her stomach gives a little flip at the thought of all the work she must do for it, and at the thought of the event itself.

  Ewa types the final address and pulls the paper from the roll. Hurriedly, she starts to pack the typewriter and replace Frida’s lists in the folder on the dressing table. But as she is fixing the hidden drawer back under the wardrobe, the words drifting up the staircase tell her that the voices below cannot belong to any of the officers. They are men’s voices certainly, but they are speaking Polish. It must be her father with the postman. Because, much as the occupiers wanted to find a German for the job, they have found it impossible to replace old Jabłoński. No one else knows the city’s warren of alleyways and ancient apartment blocks so well. And now that most of the streets have German names again, as well as new-fangled postal codes, the mix of languages would have flummoxed anyone who had not started out, like him, as a city postboy in the Kaiser’s Reichspost.

  It is time to get going anyhow. Today’s apartment is likely to be in the same nasty state that they usually are. She already has enough to do this week, but the more Frida relies on her, the more Ewa is taken into Frida’s confidence, especially since Helga, one of the most efficient girl-scout types at the Resettlement Office, has returned to Essen. Frida whispered to Ewa that this was because Helga’s parents were frightened about the creep of the Eastern Front ever closer to Posen. The snooty Rhinelanders, Frida said, regarded Posen as a frontier town and so they imagined that some Cossacks, thousands of kilometres away, were more dangerous to their darling Helga than the nightly Allied bombardment they were getting in Essen.

  The idea that the Allies could one day win the war had always given Ewa a glow of secret smugness. With Germany defeated, the Republic of Poland would return and all of her wartime sacrifices would be recognised. But, as Frida prattled on, Ewa began to imagine what the military conquest of German-held lands might look like to the people who lived there, and foreboding tremored through her.

  The typed sheets remain face-up on the silky bedspread as Ewa locks the bedroom door behind her. The chance of anyone wanting to enter her room is so slim that it is not worth the time to clear them away. Below, her father and Jabłoński are shouting about traffic congestion, and the best way, whilst there are so many vehicles heading for the Castle, to avoid St Martin Strasse, or Święty Marcin as her father carelessly calls it. But nevertheless, it is Eva that he calls up the stairs and Ewa winces with irritation at her German name.

  Jabłoński is smiling up at her from beneath the silver spread-eagle on his oversized cap and holding out an envelope. Ewa sees her father exchange a look with him then a wink and she whisks the envelope from Jabłoński’s hand with a curt Danke. The word Feldpost is embossed above the address and instantly, she knows who the letter is from.

  In the dining room, Ewa leans against the sideboard and studies the envelope. Her name and address are written in an elegant flowing hand: Frl Hartman, Gasthaus Hartman, Alter Markt, Posen. She wonders why
he has not written before now. It is almost six months since he left. She has almost forgotten about him. The flimsy envelope crackles open.

  Feldpost 00608 30. IX. 1943

  Lieber Frl Hartman,

  Please accept my sincere apologies for failing to write to you as I promised that I would. My only excuse is that I was never sure of what I could say to you apart from reminiscing about the joy of my stay at Gasthaus Hartman. But the very sweetness of these memories was painful amidst the distastefulness around me. So please try, if you can, to forgive me for my silence.

  I write now in haste, but with some good news. I shall be returning soon to Posen. I have been tasked to deliver a lecture on 6 Oct so I shall be back in the city by that date. I have scant hope of a vacancy in your delightful establishment, but should there be one, could you and your father bear me in mind?

  Even should a bed not be available, I intend dear Frl Hartman, to take a meal at the Gasthaus, and I hope sincerely to thereby resume our acquaintance.

  Mit besten Grüssen,

  SS-Obersturmführer Heinrich Beck

  Ewa frowns. This sounds nothing like the man she remembers. She knows all of the troops’ post goes through a censor, but that is no reason to keep up such a strange formality. ‘… thereby resume our acquaintance’ sounds more like something he might write to one of his old professors rather than to a woman with whom he has shared a passionate embrace. But there has been no one else who has taken her fancy since he left, although a few have tried their best to entice her.

  She folds the letter back into the envelope as her father puts his head around the door.

  ‘News from the front?’

  He has switched languages and seems even more jovial in German. Perhaps it is an impression of his long-dead grandfather.

  ‘A booking enquiry actually. From Obersturmführer Beck. Remember him?’

  Her father screws up his face then smirks. ‘The one who tried to take you to the pictures?’