CONTENTS
PART ONE: PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER
1. NORFOLK, EARLY MARCH, 1945
2. THE HEARTBROKEN NAZI
3. LABOR
4. WIN LITTLE
5. DNA
6. RUTH
7. A WINK IN THE BARLEY
8. THINGS RUTH DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT GEORGE AT THE TIME
9. EGG AND SOLDIERS
10. A HOME FIT FOR HEROES
11. THE PERFUME OF AXLE GREASE, THE WHIFF OF HALITOSIS
12. GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT (NEARLY)
13. THE BEST OF ROOMS, THE WORST OF ROOMS
14. 1956: THE CLOCKWORK OF HISTORY TICKS
15. AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
16. NORFOLK FROM THE SKY
17. THE END-OF-THE-WORLD MAN
18. WIN’S MELLOWING
19. THE STRAWBERRY FIELDS, EARLY SUMMER, 1962
20. THE GIRL WHO ATE HIS HEART BUMS A SMOKE
21. THINGS CLEM DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT FRANKIE AT THE TIME
22. NERVY PASTORAL
23. A LATIN-AMERICAN INTERLUDE
24. SEEING THE FOREST FROM THE TREES
25. YOU LEARN NOTHING ABOUT SEX FROM BOOKS, ESPECIALLY IF THEY’RE BY D. H. LAWRENCE
26. MAN IS NOT AN ISLAND; HE’S A PENINSULA
27. A BIT OF CHIAROSCURO
28. THE NIGHTS DRAW IN
29. THE LIMITED OPPORTUNITIES FOR OBTAINING CONTRACEPTIVES IN NORTH NORFOLK IN 1962 . . .
PART TWO: BLOWING THINGS APART
30. WASHINGTON, D.C., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1962: “THOSE SONS A BITCHES RUSSIANS!”
31. MAD
32. HAWKS, DOVES, DOGS
33. GEORGE DOES A BIT OF TIDYING UP
34. GOOD EVENING, MY FELLOW CITIZENS
35. THE LAMBS OF GOD ARE SHORN
36. RUTH GETS THE CHOP
37. THE BOGS
38. STUMBLING TOWARD THE BRINK
39. THE SHIFTY WORD Standstill
40. THE BRINK
41. POETRY DOES THE TRICK
42. JACK AND NIKITA TALK TURKEY
43. THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED
PART THREE: PICKING UP THE PIECES
44. MY LIFE AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD
45. BAD TIMING
AUTHOR’S NOTE
RUTH ACKROYD WAS in the garden checking the rhubarb when the RAF Spitfire accidentally shot her chimney pot to bits. The shock of it brought the baby on three weeks early.
“I was expectun,” she’d often say, over the years. “But I wunt expectun that.”
She’d had cravings throughout her pregnancy, ambitious ones: tinned ham, chocolate, potted shrimp, her husband’s touch, rhubarb. Rhubarb was possible, though. Ruth and her mother, Win, grew it in the cottage garden. They forced it, which is to say, they covered the plants with upended buckets so that when new tendrils poked through the soil, they found themselves in the dark and grew like mad, groping for light. Stalks of forced rhubarb were soft, blushed, and stringless. You could eat them without sugar, which was rationed, and Ruth wanted to. So she’d waddled out into the garden on a rare day of early-spring sunshine to lift the buckets and see how things were doing. See if there was any chance of a nibble.
Win had said, “You put that ole coat on, if yer gorn out. There’s a wind’d cut yer jacksy in half.”
Ruth hadn’t seen George since his last leave, when, silently (because Win was sleeping, or listening, a thin wall away), he’d got her pregnant. Now he was in Africa. Or Italy, or somewhere. There was no way she could imagine his life. He might even be dead. The last letter had come in January:
The last push, or so they say . . . Cold as hell here in the nights . . . Hope you and the little passenger are well.
Love, George
Probably not dead, because there’d have been a telegram. Like Brenda Cushion had got, six months ago.
Ruth had gone down the garden path with her huge belly in front of her. She was frightened of it. She had little idea what giving birth might involve. Win had told her almost nothing; she was against the whole thing. Knocked up by a soldier: history repeating itself. Nothing good could come of it. The baby had grown in Ruth, struggling and undiscussed. An unspeakable thing. A wartime mishap. The two women had sat the winter out in front of dying fires of scrounged fuel, listening to the wireless, grimly knitting, not talking about it.
Washing blew on the line: tea towels, Ruth’s yellowish vests, her mother’s bloomers ballooned by the wind, their elasticated leg holes pouting.
There were two rhubarb clumps, a rusty-lipped bucket inverted over each. Ruth had leaned, grunting, to lift the first one when all hell broke loose above her head.
The air-raid siren had not gone off. The air-raid siren was a big gray thing the shape of a surprised mouth, mounted on a wooden tower behind the Black Cat Garage, more than a mile away. It made a moan that turned hysterical, then stopped, then started over again, rising in pitch, driving the local dogs mad. Throughout the summer of 1940, it had wailed day and night as the German planes came over, and Ruth and Win had spent terrible long hours in the darkness under the stairs, waiting for it to stop. Or for the riot in the skies to fall upon them and kill them. (Sometimes Ruth couldn’t stand it and had gone outside, despite her mother’s prayerful begging, to watch and listen to the dogfights in the sky, the white vapor trails scratched against the blue, the black trails of planes falling, the awful hesitations of engine noise that meant one of ours or one of theirs was falling, a man in a machine was burning down.) But on this occasion, the siren remained silent. There had been no German air raids for eighteen months, after all. The war was over, bar the shouting.
So Ruth was terribly surprised when the chimney pot exploded and the German plane came from behind the elms and filled the garden with savage noise. The machine was so low that she was certain it would plunge into the cottage. She fell backwards with her knees in the air and saw, with absolute clarity, the rivets that held the bomber together and its vulnerable glass nose and the black cross on its fuselage and the banner of fire that trailed from its wing. One of the Spitfires in pursuit was pulling out of a dive. Its underbelly was the same blue as the heavy old pram that Chrissie Slender had lent her. The sound of the planes was so all-consuming that the fragments of the chimney tumbled silently into the yard. Inside their wire run, the hens frenzied.
YOU’LL THINK IT fanciful, I suppose, but I blame that German plane for my lifelong dislike of surprises and loud noises. It’s an unfortunate dislike, really, because the world, during my long stay in it, has got noisier and noisier. And more and more surprising.
It so happens that I know who flew that Junkers 88 over Bratton Morley, at little more than tree height, on March 9, 1945. Forty years after his suicidal flight, I was in Holland, doing research for a picture book about what were called doodlebugs, the German rocket bombs launched upon England during the last year of the Second World War. In Amsterdam I spent almost a week in a thin and lovely old building full of books and maps and documents and photographs. It was like being in an immensely tall bookcase. On my last day, one of the librarians brought me a book entitled Our Last Days. It was a collection of first-person accounts by German servicemen and civilians of their experiences during the final desperate stage of the war they knew they had lost. I flicked through it and saw the words RAF Beckford, which was the name of the Norfolk air base four miles from where, in an untimely and messy fashion, I was born. I licked my finger and turned the pages back. The piece was a badly written (or poorly translated) story by a former Luftwaffe sergeant called Ottmar Sammer.
I struggle to tell you how I felt when I read it. A bit like looking in a mirror for the first time in years, perhaps.
Here, in my own words, is Sammer’s story.
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He’d spent the last two years of the war in charge of the ground crew of a squadron commanded by Oberst Karlheinz Metz. Metz was, as a pilot, both brilliant and fearless. He’d joined the Luftwaffe at the age of eighteen, and by the time he was twenty, he was dropping bombs on Spanish democrats, thus helping to inspire Picasso’s Guernica. During the blitzkrieg on Britain, he’d flown more raids than any other officer. Once, he’d flown his crippled bomber back from Plymouth with all his crew dead. He’d won so many medals that if he’d worn them all at once, the sheer weight of them would have made him fall flat on his face. (That was the nearest that Sammer came to making a joke.) Metz was also a passionate Nazi. There was a photograph of him in the book. The odd thing was that no matter how long I studied it, I forgot what he looked like as soon as I turned the page. He was weirdly ordinary-looking.
In March 1945, Metz’s squadron was stationed in western Holland. His situation was quite hopeless. American and Canadian forces were less than fifty miles from his airfield. He had not flown, nor received any orders, for more than two weeks. Of the twenty-two planes he’d originally commanded, only seven still existed. Of those, only three were airworthy. He had, despite his demands, only enough fuel to get one plane to England and maybe back. On March 7 he received a signal from Berlin telling him to destroy his aircraft and retreat his squadron eastward to the German border.
Metz did as he was told, almost. On the morning of March 9, he assembled the surviving members of his squadron and made an inspirational speech about the defense of the Fatherland. His men raised their hats and cheered him; then they put explosives in all the aircraft except one and blew them up. Imagine that: a row of machines, which had known the inside of clouds, going bang and slumping their flaming arms to the ground. Sammer said that Metz kept his face straight while he supervised it but that tears ran down his face. (I suspect that Ottmar was gilding the lily there.) Metz then ordered his men into trucks and watched them drive away. Not all the men, though. He’d kept Sammer and the armorer and another man behind. Metz got them to fuel up the surviving 88. He also got them to load the belt-fed machine guns, despite the fact that there were no gunners. At this point Sammer realized what the Oberst was intending to do. He claims that he tried to talk Metz out of it but was ignored.
When the plane was ready, Metz led the others to the squadron headquarters, which was a low building made of concrete blocks, its curved corrugated-iron roof covered with camouflage netting. Most of the floor space was the operations room, in which metal chairs were arranged in front of a blackboard and a map easel. Metz instructed his men to bring four chairs through into his personal quarters, which was not much more than a dimly lit cubbyhole containing his camp bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. A slightly garish color-tinted photograph of Adolf Hitler hung on the end wall. On the chest were an almost-full bottle of Cognac, six glasses, a framed photograph of a handsome young Luftwaffe pilot with dark hair flopping almost to his eyes, and a windup gramophone with a horn like a huge brass daffodil. Metz told the others to sit, then served them generous measures of brandy. He cranked the gramophone and lowered the needle onto the disc. The four men sat and listened to a piano sonata by Beethoven, the Appassionata. During its quieter passages, the gasping and collapsing of burning aircraft was clearly audible. During its turbulent finale, Metz, his eyes closed, made vaguely musical gestures with his fists. When it was over, he remained in his chair for several long moments, seemingly mesmerized by the blip and hiss of the gramophone. At last he got to his feet and deliberately dragged the needle across the surface of the disc, ruining it. The brass daffodil screeched in agony. Metz then stood to attention in front of the Führer’s portrait, jabbed his right arm out, and said, or rather yelled, “Heil Hitler!” The other men hastily, if less enthusiastically, followed suit.
The Oberst picked up the photograph from the chest, tucked it under one arm, and led Sammer and the others briskly out to his plane. The radiance from the white-hot aircraft carcasses wobbled the air. He shook hands with each of the men in turn, wished them good luck, and climbed up into the cockpit. When the engines were firing steadily, Sammer pulled the chocks away from the wheels and Metz taxied bumpily onto the runway.
Metz’s last orders to Sammer had been to take his — Metz’s — staff car and catch up with the rest of the evacuated squadron. Sammer disobeyed. As soon as the Junkers was airborne, the sergeant returned to the Oberst’s room and stripped the sheet from the bed. He attached it to a tent pole, and with this white flag of truce sticking out of the front passenger window, he and his colleagues drove south, not east. They surrendered to the first Canadian troops they came across, who apparently treated them as a bit of a nuisance. I was a little surprised that Sammer jovially admitted to all this in his memoir, which ends at this point. I’ve patched together the end of Metz’s story from other sources, one of which is my imagination.
Metz flew extremely low over the North Sea in an effort to sneak under British radar. At first the weather was on his side: it was very murky. It cleared, however, just before he reached the coast of East Anglia, and he was spotted by a coast-guard station just north of Great Yarmouth. (He could hardly have been missed; he nearly took the station’s radio mast off.) Seven minutes from his target, he came under attack by three Spitfires.
That target was RAF Beckford, and Metz’s plan was simple: he would dive his plane onto the damned place and purge it with fire. That he himself would die was no matter. To all intents and purposes, he’d been dead for almost two years already. This had to do with the photograph that he’d propped up in the copilot’s seat, the beautiful young flier with the tumbling hair. The boy had joined the squadron in the autumn of 1942, and for six months Metz had experienced an agonizing happiness. He’d felt a need to nurture and protect that went against the grain of himself. The friction had been delicious.
Then, in May 1943, the boy had been killed. Metz, frozen at the controls of his own plane, with his flight engineer screaming in his headphones, had watched it happen. Had watched the two British Hurricanes following his darling’s smoking machine down like frenzied sharks following a blood leak, triangulating the bullets in as if there were an infinity of bullets. Had watched the boy’s plane do a half cartwheel into the sea and simply cease to exist. Joy and love gone, bang, just like that, swallowed into the crinkled gray texture of the English sea. The Hurricanes were from RAF Beckford; Metz intended to end his war with a vengeance.
Flying solo, he had no way of defending himself from the Spitfires. Flying at so ridiculously low a height, he had very limited options for evasive action. So he stuck grimly to his course, watching the Norfolk landscape race toward and under him while his plane took an absurd number of hits and disintegrated around him. Just before he overflew a hamlet called Bratton Morley (did he glimpse a bulbous woman lifting her shocked face and falling over?), his starboard engine caught fire.
Metz didn’t make it to Beckford, although he got close. Two miles from the air base, he plunged, burning, into a sizable tract of forest known locally as Abbots Wood. He had almost certainly died by the time the ancient and heavy English trees ripped the wings from his fuselage. Jolting in the smoking cockpit, he tobogganed through the woods and plunged into a stretch of water called Perch Lake.
The woods were wet and sullen after the long winter. It didn’t take long for the crews from Beckford and Borstead to hose and beat the smoldering out. They hadn’t the equipment to lift the remains of the plane from the lake, so Metz was left sitting next to the shattered photograph of his lover under fifteen feet of silty water. Four months later, a courting couple were put off their stroke when his black and gassy body parts bobbed to the surface.
THE VIOLENT OUTRAGE overhead went away and was replaced by human noise: Win, howling Ruth’s name, punctuated by the various aliases of God. Ruth tried to call back, tried to say that she was all right, but found that she had no voice. The next thing was the banging of the gate and young Tommy Sle
nder running to the back door, going, “Gor, bogger! Missus? Ruthie? You seen that? That Jerry? Come over just now? That near on took our chimbley off!”
Ruth got her elbows under her and looked down the garden path. The boy was running circles on the rough concrete between the kitchen door and the outside lavatory. He had his arms stretched out and was making shooting noises; they mixed strangely with Win’s howling.
“Fadda fadda fadda!”
“Ruth! Dear God, Jesus Christ!”
“Brahahaaa! You seen our boys come arter him? Bogger!”
“Sweet Lord! Ruth!”
Then Chrissie Slender was looking down at her.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You dunt look it. Can you get yerself up?”
“I dunno,” Ruth said.
“Wait you there, then,” Chrissie said, and went away.
She came back with Win, who was white-faced and fluttery, and Tommy, who had one ear pinker than the other because it had just been slapped. They pulled and pushed Ruth to her feet. The moment she was upright, a pain the shape of lightning went through her and she cried out. She thought it might be the pain of the child dying; for all she knew, violent noise might kill babies in the womb.
After a moment or two she could walk.
In the kitchen, she perched her backside on a high stool; for some time now she’d been unable to sit comfortably on a chair. Win was useless. She walked in and out of the room, clapping her hands together, looking up at the ceiling, and mumbling stuff from the Bible. Chrissie put the kettle on the stove and made a pot of tea. She found a damp residue of sugar in a crumpled blue paper bag and spooned it all into Ruth’s cup.
“Drink it,” she told Ruth. “Yer’ve had a shock. That’ll settle you.”
Ruth took a couple of sips.
“Thas it,” Chrissie said. “Thas brought the color back to yer cheeks already.”
Ruth had, in fact, gone quite red in the face. But it wasn’t recovery. It was shame. For some reason she’d let go of herself. Her lower parts were a hot flood.