find his mother sitting on the toilet. He remembered her blank expression and the grunt that escaped his mouth. He remembered the voiding of his bladder sending out a rivulet of urine inching across the linoleum floor towards her dead feet. He scrunched his eyes closed and prayed to be rid of her, only to feel guilt when that prayer successfully annulled her resurrection. Seeing her that day was to be the first of many such reunions.
By sixteen these experiences had mercifully peaked. But still his mother could unexpectedly reappear by his bed in the early hours, sometimes naked, sometimes rubbing the side of her head where the fatal tumour had been. His coping was made easier when she finally laid herself to rest in the flowerbed he was digging one morning. She seemed to dissolve, smiling, into the earth and Malcolm planted primroses, her favourite, on the miraculous spot. And perhaps he would have grown out of hallucinating altogether had it not been for Dresden.
At eleven o’clock precisely, at the opposite end of his life, Malcolm quietly closed the front door of 33 Hitchcock Road behind him. That morning he had sung his wife, Irene to sleep. Her disorientated, diseased brain held a predilection for nursery rhymes and song that complemented the involuntary habits of her puerile body. He sang until his mouth went dry, for he had to be sure she would not suffer. When at length he was assured of the depth of her sleep, Malcolm pulled up the blanket to her chin and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He put on his coat, collected his keys, and then turned on the gas fire without igniting it. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he whispered, and pulled the living room door closed behind him.
The fresh air outside was a welcome reprieve. The sky was a murky grey stain splashed haphazardly above the jagged angles of roofs and chimney pots. He headed for the bus shelter, bus pass ready to hand. The council, like the government, was grudgingly munificent that way. Cold weather payments, vouchers and tokens, rebates and exemptions; all for men who had fought for their country, killed for their king: gratitude as an afterthought.
On the bus he found a seat to himself and gazed out of the window as the rain made small dark circles on the pavement. As the shower fell in earnest the circles became bigger, joining together into larger patches until at length there was not a dry grey inch in any direction.
That was how it often was on a bombing raid. You looked down at the grotesque flowering of munitions dotting the urban landscape until there was no landscape left, only pillars of fire in a cathedral of brick dust. Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf - and still your finger depressed the button in your trembling hand, sending down more and more incendiaries. The people caught outdoors on a daylight raid often resembled insects from the belly of a Lancaster. The enemy - the real enemy, infantrymen and tank commanders - were hundreds of miles away. And these ant-like creatures were the injured, the sick, the widowed women and enfeebled old men left behind.
In spite of the weather the centre of town was busy: a migrating army of leaf-cutter ants encumbered by umbrellas bobbed along the thoroughfares of the urban jungle. Queues filled every shop, as if those waiting were only buying a bread roll or a first class stamp to escape the rain. He stared as a policeman chatted amiably with a traffic warden; at old ladies with tan brown shopping trolleys and clear plastic headscarves; listless teenagers with gelled hair and foul mouths; and, even on a school day, children. They splashed in the puddles; then dragged their heels. Children were life’s great constant. Whatever the time or place, children were universally the same: curious, vulnerable and innocent; the ubiquitous couriers of love and hope.
He closed his eyes, and tried to breathe again. That Irene had never conceived was only fair, Malcolm decided, in view of what he had done to children during the war.
The bus screeched to a halt. It was only a short walk to the library, which helped break the chain of his thoughts. He enjoyed the library, its peace and orderliness, and had done so long before his retirement. This, then, was where he would wait. He needed the house to be well filled with gas but not to the extent that it started to force its way outside and alert neighbours or passers-by. He would wait here quietly for a short while and then make his way home. After that, everything could be put right.
The raindrops tapped lightly on the library skylight, reminding him of a weekend at Folkestone. The post war period was a difficult time to get married and set up home in. Sometimes it was hard for the nation to see the gutted city centres, the rationing and the red sabre rattling of a former ally on the news and recognise itself as a victor. Only married a few months, Malcolm filled the initial dozen weekends renovating their first home, desperate to prove himself worthy to his father-in-law, and exhausting himself in the process.
The flowers that day spoke of late spring, and the mild breeze of early summer. The Saturday afternoon rain, though, was strictly April. The weather cornered them in a tea shop for two hours, where a scowling proprietor angrily cleared their empty cups until they ordered more. They whispered and giggled like teenagers until a sliver of sunlight hinted that the worst was over. The threat of more tea made them take the chance of a twenty minute march to the hotel. Half way there a sullen bruising of cloud released what felt like half the bay upon them, and drenched and breathless, they burst through the lobby doors like hail stones.
‘We’d better get out of these wet clothes, love,’ Malcolm said back in their room, as his eyes traced the contours of the youthful figure beneath her clinging summer dress.
Irene slipped her legs from her stockings, not taking her eyes from his. ‘Yes, I think we should.’
How could it be that in the blink of an eye something so beautifully alive, so deft and giving could become the helpless, grey dummy he’d left propped in front of an unlit fire? He sometimes wondered what he had done to deserve such a gruelling finale to his life, when the truth was only too apparent. But he had not realised the nature of his crime until after the deed was done, so how could it be his fault? All was fair in love and war, but more so for some than others, it seemed.
Inside the library he watched two four-year-olds playing chase around a book trolley and thought of the tiny faces that had looked up into his as he cruised murderously over rubble-strewn Germany. But Dresden had been a night raid and had spared him that particular torment. That had not stopped him from imagining their screams, however, for children everywhere are afraid of the dark.
Even Irene had rediscovered that fear as her illness took hold. Soon, though, he would lead her back into the light, peacefully and painlessly; unlike those who had stumbled blindly through the melting streets on the banks of the River Elbe.
Soon the war would end, everyone had said. Germany was being squeezed into oblivion from east and west. Economically and militarily the Third Reich was a spent force, but still she struggled to assert her heinous ideology on Europe. On the night of February 13th, 1945, Dresden was a strategic rail and river transport centre; within twenty-four hours it had effectively ceased to exist. Over thirty-five thousand people died, and because Dresden was also a refugee centre, most of those weren’t fit to resist a stiff breeze let alone the Allied onslaught.
Malcolm had been with the first wave of bombers, thundering across the night sky: thirty-five thousand people blown apart and scorched into ash. Then Hitler was dead and the map of Europe was re-drawn again, and Malcolm was on his way back home to a hero’s welcome and the revelation of what he had done in the name of freedom.
Malcolm was even able to suppress his guilt for a while - until a nephew of Irene’s came for tea one Friday evening.
‘I didn’t actually fly the bombers, Charles,’ Malcolm laughed uneasily, ‘so much as fly in them.’
‘But what did you do, then, Uncle Malcolm?’ the boy asked with a look of great seriousness.
‘I was just a member of the crew,’ he answered, a little too abruptly. ‘Now finish your cake.’
‘I bet you have some great stories,’ the boy enthused. ‘Go on, Uncle Malcolm, tell me one, just one; please!’
Malcolm began to feel balmy, yet when he loo
sened his collar the skin there felt cold and clammy. Couldn’t he just make something up? The boy would never know whether it were true or not.
‘Most of the raids were at night, so you couldn’t see much except the odd searchlight beam, exploding flak and (fire-storms) the like. We had a few bumpy rides, but we lived to tell the tale,’ he added having scrupulously avoided telling any tales at all.
The boy’s intuition was right, though: there were stories he could have told. Like the night Number One Engine caught fire and the whole journey home was spent watching the flames dwindle into darkness one moment and then explode back into life again just when it seemed the danger had passed. How excited would Charles be, Malcolm wondered, if he told him how he was so scared in between missions that he started wetting his bed at the age of twenty-one? Or how he saw the Angel of Death climbing aboard a succession of other bombers that never returned with remarkable accuracy? Malcolm could not decide which frightened him most, being thought of as a madman or a murderer, for in his darkest hours he was both.
‘Would you like to fly a plane when you grow up, Charles?’ The boy was not to be so easily thrown off the scent, though.
‘What did it look like