‘Yes.’
‘I do too. I have dreams, but I have never told anyone. So I will tell you, but you will laugh at me. I am serious, though. My god I am serious! I want one day to be given the job of flying a Spitfire. It is the most beautiful aircraft ever made.’
She raised the shoot she was still holding and threw it away from her like a dart, towards the top of the bank. For a few instants it seemed to respond to the warm air, flew through it as if finding lift, then it landed stalk-first amid the weeds growing along the high part of the bank. It stayed upright for two or three seconds, before wavering and toppling slowly to the side. Krystyna glanced at Torrance’s face, perhaps to see if he was laughing at her. But he was not.
She said, ‘All the girls I work with in the pool have the same dream. One or two of them have actually been given one to fly, but it does not happen often. We say the Spitfire is so sensuous, a kind of ideal lover, not a man, but something like a fine stallion that has to be tamed and ridden, a giant cat hunting at speed. The Spitfire is flown by men, but it was meant for women. We wear it like a close-fitting garment, an extra skin. I have a photograph of a Spitfire on the wall in my room, and I yearn to be inside it. Most of the ATA girls feel the same way, and although we joke about it and tease each other, underneath we are obsessed by it. Every now and then we go to the despatch office, and there is the order posted on the blackboard. It is like winning a big prize, and whoever is on the rota that day is like a film star. We all envy her.’
‘Never you, though?’
‘Not me, so far. I hope it is not never.’
‘So is that it? A flight in a plane?’
‘Not just a plane, and not just any Spitfire. It has to be one of the ones they are building now, the Mark XI. Do you know what that means?’
Torrance said inadequately, ‘I work on bombers. We never see fighters, so I don’t—’
‘The Spitfire XI is the best, the most beautiful of all Spitfires! It is not a fighter. It is built for photo-reconnaissance, so all it carries is high-powered cameras. To save weight it has no weapons, and to give it range it carries auxiliary fuel tanks. It can fly so high it can never be seen, and it is so fast that no other aircraft can catch up with it.’ She had stopped walking and was standing in the middle of the narrow lane, waving her hands with excitement. ‘It is a work of art, Michael! To see a Spitfire flying overhead has the same effect as fine art: you feel altered, improved by being close to it. I sometimes think that even if this war is in the end lost to the Germans, everything will be justified by the fact that the British designed and invented the Spitfire. You think I am mad?’
Torrance said, ‘No, because—’
‘But I think I am mad! It is my madness, Michael. Forgive me, because I have come to this country and the only thing I can do to help this war is to fly, and to fly a Spitfire is the greatest of all acts. It is now the only thing I want, all I have left to achieve. Sometimes I lie in my bed and I imagine myself strapped into the cockpit of a long-range Spitfire, flying it high and fast, away from this war, far away, into the clouds and then above them, across the blue, scraping the roof of this world, flying forever, no Germans, no enemies, just the free air and the sky.’
She stopped then, staring at him. Her face was flushed, her hands were still raised. To Torrance she seemed at that moment to be beyond his reach, somewhere unattainable by him, above all daily concerns, free of the grim realities of the unfinished war. He glimpsed tears that had sprung into her eyes. She wiped them with a finger against her lids, and looked away.
‘My god, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I am like this with you. I have never told anyone that before.’
He stepped towards her, put both his arms around her. No resistance – she held herself against him. He realized she was trembling.
‘Michael, please – I want this over.’
‘It’s all right.’ He tried to kiss her but she turned her face – he managed to press his lips briefly to her cheek. They stood like that for a while, but then gradually released each other. They walked on slowly.
‘We speak of Spitfires,’ Krystyna said, as they reached the entrance to the airstrip. The chunky tip of the Anson’s tail fin could be seen from the lane. ‘But this is what I must fly today.’
The workmanlike, distinctly non-sensuous plane was waiting where she had parked it earlier. A young AC2 had been sent out to guard it, but as soon as Krystyna showed him her card pass he saluted her and went inside the command caravan. Torrance walked over to wait beside the aircraft while Krystyna went to the caravan to file her planned route, and to pick up the latest weather and operational data. When she came out again she had already pulled on her leather flying helmet, and her gloves.
14
The return flight to Tealby Moor took as long as the outbound trip, but to Mike Torrance it felt as if it was over in a few minutes. When the airfield was in sight, Krystyna circled the plane around the perimeter before landing, giving him a bird’s eye view of the base he knew so well – he soon picked out the row of huts where he lived and slept, the hangar where he worked, and so on. He could also see the sea, surprisingly not at all far from the base, or so it looked from the air – normally, the ground crews’ only awareness of its presence was the bitterly cold wind that sometimes scoured them from the east. There were more surprises from this temporary high vantage point: the rise of land that gave Tealby Moor its name, the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, was all but indistinguishable from the air. The climb up to the airfield after a visit to the nearby market town of Market Rasen sometimes seemed a real challenge after an evening in the pub, but from the air it looked like no hill at all.
Staring down at the large field below the end of the main runway, Torrance looked for and found the still-visible trace of where H Henry had crashed after being shot down: the large black triangle burnt into the crops by the wreckage was starting to be grown through, and would soon disappear.
Krystyna levelled the Anson, throttled back the engines, and took the plane down to a gentle landing on the main concrete runway. She turned off on an access runway more or less at once, and taxied directly to Dispersal 11. She cut the engines, and an erk Torrance did not recognize ran out from one of the buildings and chocked both the main wheels.
She ripped off her helmet and shook out her dark hair.
‘So we say goodbye, Michael,’ she said.
‘I don’t like goodbye,’ he said. ‘Too final. Anyway, you have promised.’
‘I know. But I have to go. You do too.’
‘The French say au revoir.’
‘Au revoir, Michael.’
‘I will contact you soon. I will write to you, I will telephone you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Krystyna, I—’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know what to say. What I can say.’ The words of love were in him, and he was bursting to let them out, but here, in this cramped cockpit, in the late-afternoon sunshine, with a ground crew erk standing there, he could not say them. ‘I don’t want to lose you,’ he said.
‘Then remember me by my real name.’
‘Malina.’
‘Yes – don’t forget our secret.’
She leant towards him and for a joyful moment he thought she was offering him a kiss. Instead, she was reaching across his lap to push open the cockpit door on his side. It gusted back in the wind on its hinges, banging against the fuselage. He freed himself from the seat harness, then turned and lowered himself to the wing and jumped down to the grass. Krystyna climbed down on her side at the same time.
The erk who had chocked the wheels was only a short distance away, staring at them.
The day with her had ended. She gave him her hand and they shook formally, then she walked swiftly towards the flight building. She did not look back. Torrance waited until she had disappeared inside, then walked over to where he had left his bicycle. Full of memories, dreaming impossible hopes, replaying snatches of conversation, remembering her face, he pe
dalled slowly back to the hut.
While he was still on the perimeter road the Anson accelerated down the main runway into the wind, its engines making an uneven roar. He halted the bike, propped it up with one foot on the ground and waved to the pilot. If there was any response from Krystyna he was unable to see it.
Ten minutes later he was back in the familiar and abrasive world of the Nissen hut and the other ground crew, but now he felt painfully distant from the men. They knew it too – some kind of coarse rumour about him had gone around the instrument section in his absence. He put up with the teasing and the ribald comments until lights out, then gladly sank into the peace and introspection of darkness.
At last he was able to think properly about Krystyna: the touch of her hands, her voice, the light brushing of her strands of dark hair against the side of his face, the glimpsing of the silent tears. Also her sheer, fascinating, unarguable foreignness. He was awake most of the night – he was utterly, hopelessly in love with her.
15
Torrance had only two ways of making contact with Krystyna afterwards. The simpler and cheaper was to write to her at the Hamble address she had given him. The trouble was that as everyone in the RAF knew all outgoing mail was censored before it was sent on. This made everyone circumspect by habit: no serving airman was allowed to give any hint of his exact location, or the type of work he was doing, or what his working hours were, or the exact days of upcoming periods of leave. Even letters kept to the dull minimum of information were prey to the black obliterations of the censors. Stories went around the huts about apparently harmless letters home, or to a girlfriend, arriving at their destination with so many arbitrary cuts and blacked-out lines that nothing was left that made any sense.
He was not even sure if he was permitted to make any contact at all with someone in the ATA – he imagined the possibility of some undefined secrecy about her work.
Whatever the reason, no letter that he wrote to Krystyna, in some of which he shyly called her Malina, ever received a reply.
Then there was the telephone. Aside from the prohibitive cost of a call, there were almost insuperable problems. Torrance realized that he must have been lucky when he first telephoned her about the purse. Long-distance connections were largely reserved for the authorities and the military staff. His first few attempts to get through after their meeting were thwarted by the operator telling him that the trunk lines were all engaged, and the one time he did get through someone else answered. It was a woman, who told him that ‘Miss Roszca’ was not at home. It must have been her roommate Lisbeth, but the knowledge that she was the daughter of Air Vice Marshal Rearden put fear into him. He stuttered a message out, asking her to tell Krystyna he had phoned and that he would try again when he could. He hoped, irrationally, that Krystyna would find some way to return his call, but in reality the only telephone was the poorly lit call-box outside the NAAFI, which was usually in use when the ground crews were not working. Anyway, he had no idea how he could arrange an incoming call to it.
He was aching to see her again. He thought about her constantly.
He was not alone with such longing. Separation from loved ones was a normal state on RAF stations. Many of the men used their spare time for letter-writing, or for reading and re-reading the letters that came for them. Torrance knew his worries about Krystyna were not unique, but that did not help.
Meanwhile, the weekly toll of missing aircraft continued, and with those losses the unwelcome knowledge that another group of young men had at best been taken prisoner, or worse, injured when the plane was attacked, or worst of all, killed in the wreckage as the aircraft was shot down or when it crashed to the ground or into the sea.
Torrance knew his own life was not in any real danger, although everyone on the base had heard reports of occasional attacks on airfields by German intruders, and what had happened to the crew of H Henry was still a fresh and nightmarish memory. Unconcerned about himself, he worried about Krystyna.
The summer ran its course, turned to autumn, then dragged slowly into winter. Torrance heard nothing from Krystyna. Bomber Command was mounting a winter offensive against the German capital, Berlin, with a long series of massed raids. From the point of view of the aircrew these were the most arduous bombing attacks of the war. The distance travelled to and from the target was at the limit of the Lancasters’ range and involved hours of dangerous flying. The weather was almost always bad, with heavy cloud-cover and icing being constant problems, the German night fighters had introduced several effective new methods of attacking the RAF aircraft, and the city itself was well defended with powerful antiaircraft guns. Casualties were inevitable every time there was a raid, and 148 Squadron suffered as many dead or missing men as every other operational unit at that time.
For Torrance, a feeling of numbness set in, partly as a reaction to the casualties, but also as a defence against the background feeling of disappointment about Krystyna. A part of him still clung to the hope that she would make contact with him soon, but in reality he knew that he was probably never going to hear from her again. Whatever it was that had existed, was gone.
On the first day of February, the squadron was particularly demoralized because of what had happened the night before. It had been a disastrous raid, with a total of thirty-three British aircraft lost in all. Five of them were 148 Squadron’s Lancasters. Four were known to have been shot down, while the fifth had crashed during the long flight home. By this time the ground crews were accustomed to the tragedies these events involved, while never shrugging them off, but to lose five crews in one night was a terrible and discouraging blow. One of the aircraft that was lost was G George, which Torrance had been servicing for several weeks. He knew the aircrew well.
In the afternoon two replacement Lancasters were flown in, arriving at the distant dispersal at the same time as Torrance was heading back to the instrument section after lunch. As he walked along he saw a car speeding across the airfield. It came to a halt close to where he was walking and the passenger climbed out. He headed towards the squadron HQ.
Torrance recognized the uniform straight away: it was the royal blue of the ATA. He stopped dead, staring uncontrollably. The pilot was a man, a tall figure, slim, erect. He was walking slowly away.
Torrance could not help himself. He ran to catch up with the pilot, essaying a clumsy salute as he rushed along.
‘Sir, sir!’
The man halted, and turned. He glanced at Torrance’s well-worn fatigues, took in their meaning.
‘You don’t have to call me sir,’ he said. ‘I am not an RAF officer.’
‘Sir, I know who you are!’ Torrance said, feeling out of breath even though he had dashed no more than about twenty yards. ‘I need to ask you something, please.’
‘You say you know me?’
‘I meant – I know you fly with the ATA.’
‘Yes, I do.’
In the excitement of the moment, Torrance’s mind was racing. He briefly recalled the bizarre stories that went around about the male ATA pilots, with their alleged crutches, glass eyes and wooden legs. This man appeared whole and fit, but he was silver haired, past middle age, well beyond the age of operational pilots, or even of administrative officers. Torrance became more flustered by these thoughts.
‘I’m sorry!’ he said. ‘I don’t know what—’
‘You said you wanted to ask me something.’
Torrance took a breath, trying to steady himself, but he was tense all over and the sudden deep intake of the wintry air made him cough. Finally he said, ‘I am trying to make contact with a – a friend, a pilot with the ATA. I don’t know how to go about finding her.’
‘She’s one of our women pilots?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I don’t have much contact with the women’s ferry pool,’ he said. ‘We are based in different places all over the country. Can you tell me her name?’
‘She is called Krystyna Roszca. She’s a Second Officer, and she
comes from Poland.’
‘Poland – yes, I know there are several Poles flying with us. Where is she based?’
‘At Hamble,’ Torrance said.
‘I’m at White Waltham. That’s quite a distance from Hamble. I’m afraid I don’t know of Miss Roszca. Have you tried the Polish government in exile?’
‘No. I had not thought of that.’
‘Well, maybe they wouldn’t tell you what you want to know. I suppose you have a good reason for wanting to hear from her?’ Torrance knew he was blushing. The man smiled. ‘Would you like me to see if I can get a message to her?’
‘Sir, if you would.’ He stammered out a rush of words: please ask her to phone me, no, write to me, get to this airfield somehow, it’s important, urgent, I must hear from her soon.
The man listened quietly, then took out a notebook. He asked Torrance for his full name and rank, and his service number, who the NCO in charge of his unit was, and the name of the senior officer. He wrote all that down. He told Torrance his own name: he was First Officer Dennis Fielden, and gave Torrance an address where he could be contacted – the airfield at White Waltham – and even the address of the ATA headquarters in London, which he suggested, ‘if all else fails’, might be the best way of locating Krystyna. He reminded Torrance that because of wartime security concerns it could be difficult to obtain exact information about personnel.
‘Aircraftman First Class Michael Torrance,’ he said, reading out what he had written down. ‘Will she know your name and rank?’
‘Yes.’
‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes these things can be found out. I joined the ATA at the beginning of the war, so I know my way around.’
When Torrance returned to work he felt more cheerful than he had for weeks, but for the rest of the base it was still a time heavy with sadness.
Three days passed, but because of Fielden’s confident manner Torrance felt certain everything was going to be all right. On the afternoon of the fourth day he was summoned without warning to the Adjutant’s office in the main block. He borrowed a bike and pedalled across there quickly – he had never been anywhere near the Adjutant’s office before and when he reached the main building he had to ask the way.