Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [69]
And everything was changed. The calendar twisted out of shape; the day lost its anonymity: 7 December became Pearl Harbor.
Interrupted by crackling, the announcer stated the facts. Something between fifty to a hundred planes from a Japanese aircraft carrier . . . bombs . . . ships sunk . . . civilians machine-gunned from the air . . .
And after the news bulletin, clutching on to normality, back to the programme: Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ filtering through the speaker.
Louis stood up. ‘I’ll just tell your mother. She feels left out, up there.’
‘Dad?’
He turned back. Nancy gestured towards the radio.
‘I guess this is it.’
He looked suddenly tired. ‘Oh yes, I guess so.’
Through the day news bulletins interrupted the programmes: we bring you the latest from Pearl Harbor . . . And now back to ‘Paradise in Waltz time’ . . . heavy damage and loss of life in Hawaii . . . And next, an André Kostelanetz selection . . . three ships sunk including the USS Arizona . . . a medley of Southern airs on the banjo . . . When the music faded, normality ceased to exist: Japan announces she has entered a state of war with Britain and the United States from dawn today . . . President Roosevelt is dictating a message to Congress.
A vast swathe of smoke hung over the harbour. There was a smell of burning wood and something metallic, stinging. Rescue teams moved charred bodies from water to land, carrying them ashore, laying them carefully in long lines by the side of the bay, to be identified by colleagues or relatives. Lois, frantic, searched for Jack. His boat had been washed ashore, empty.
Years later, when war gave way to peace and the nation went wild with celebrations for the safe return of its boys, Lois waited to welcome Jack home, with the flags and ticker-tape and the bands playing, and remembered that other day, as she ran between the lines of bodies in a hangar, racked with the terror of loss, searching the faces so similar in death, smoke-blackened, drenched. Jack’s mother had told her family stories about ill-fated Pinkerton men, one drowning in the liquid mud of a Flanders trench, another sinking to the bottom of the Anacostia river in a Washington riot, and she had prayed, her heart squeezed in dread, that the waters of the blazing harbour had not claimed her man.
And then the shock, the leaping relief as she caught sight of Jack, not among the bodies but walking towards her, and she ran headlong into him and held him so tightly that he laughingly cried out, warning her he had bruises and some burns, as he wiped away her tears.
Monday morning, and Nancy at her desk confronted a pile of letters and paperwork that had overnight become irrelevant. Newspapers carried the unforgettable images of the day: bombers snapped by amateur photographers, ships smashed and burning, columns of smoke, flames. The headlines were a Greek chorus of lamentation: the attack was a violation that left a nation in shock.
Down the corridor she heard raised voices, the ringing of telephones and the sound of hurrying footsteps. A girl from the typing pool called through the door as she passed, ‘The President’s on the radio!’
This was 8 December 1941 and the President was speaking to the nation to tell them America was at war with Japan. And beneath the sound of his voice, those patrician Roosevelt syllables, Nancy detected another sound, something resembling a train just beginning to move out of a station, getting up speed – a thousand trains, a million; a slowly building cacophony of assembly lines, machines whirring in workshops turning out uniforms, the roar of munitions factories, transports, the movement of men, the packaging of provisions, the grinding of tank tracks, the whir of propellers, the sound of a country preparing for war. The Depression was well and truly over.
32
Nancy had taken to an occasional bourbon – ‘I’m not