The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [109]
But Davey–Davey and I had come to an understanding, like.
By the start of 1941 he was stationed at Wroughton airfield, not far out of Swindon. Wroughton was a maintenance unit, preparing planes from the factories to be sent all over the country: easy work for a good mechanic like Davey. He used to wait for me outside the hospital gates on a Friday or a Saturday night to take me dancing. He seemed happy enough with that. He never kissed me, we never held hands. If he told his pals at the airbase I was his girl, I didn’t mind. It stopped any other fellow trying to cut in while we were dancing.
You had to go dancing. What else could you do? I’d bring my dance dress with me on the bus and change at the hospital, in the room with bunks that we used when we were on fire watch. One of the other girls would kneel behind me and draw a line of black pencil down the back of each bare leg while I put on my lipstick in the mirror. Then I’d do the same for her.
Sometimes the air-raid warning went while we were in the hall, siren playing a duet with the trumpets from the dance band, but we’d step on while the wardens tried to shoo us out down to the shelter. ‘If your number’s on the bomb, your number’s up,’ one of the girls at the hospital used to say, fatalistical, and she was right because she died when her dad’s Anderson shelter took a direct hit.
Davey had a car, an old Baby Austin he’d bought with money Mr Keiller had given him when he left Avebury. He kept it in a lockup garage in town, over by the railway yards. One night the garage was bombed, and a piece of masonry went through the tin roof of Davey’s car, so he salvaged a sheet of steel from the railwaymen and welded it onto the top. Wouldn’t have won any races after that, and the welds leaked when it rained, but he could drive me home after the dance.
Some nights I was on fire-watching duty at the hospital, up on a cold rooftop waiting for the bombers’ drone. Rest of the time, if the bus wasn’t cancelled because of an air raid, I went home to Avebury. As the blacked-out bus lumbered out of the town, its shaded headlamps casting only a faint gleam on the road ahead, sometimes there’d be lights on the hills.
Davey knew what was up there. Hush-hush, mum’s the word. One of his mates at the airbase had helped build a dummy town on the top of the Downs near Barbury, a burning ghost to fool the bombers and lure them away from Swindon and the railway yards. There were other decoys on the hills around: fake airfields called Q-sites, runways with goose-necked flares that no plane ever took off from.
Sometimes, when he was driving me home, we parked up under Hackpen Hill, near the White Horse that the grass’d been allowed to grow over, to stop the bombers using him as a landmark. Along the ridge in the moonlight were the chalk ramparts of the old hillfort at Barbury Castle. Funny to think it’d been built thousands of years ago, by men with spears and bows and arrows; now it held an anti-aircraft battery.
‘I’m going away,’ said Davey. ‘I’m being transferred to Scotland. Training for air crew.’ It was the spring of ‘41, awful dark in the car, but the moon was up, showing he’d taken off his forage cap and was twisting it in his hands. He never tried to kiss me now. I felt sorry for him; I should have let him be, so he could find another girl who would love him back properly, but he seemed happy enough to be with me.
‘What for?’ I said stupidly. Obvious, really: the Battle of Britain had been won, by the skin of Mr Churchill’s teeth, but a lot of young men had gone with it. The RAF needed new flyers. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t be a pilot.’ There were tears