The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [110]
‘Fed up of being an erk. I’m going to be a navigator.’
‘I’m surprised they’re letting you,’ I said. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight as he whipped round and glared. ‘That come out wrong. Meant to say, you’re too good a mechanic to lose.’
‘They’re training girls to be mechanics now. Bleedin’ heck, one turned up in the Air Transport Auxiliaries the other day–pilot trained. She’s going to be flying planes across country to deliver to the bases. Can’t have them flying missions, though, can they? Men still the only ones can do that. Anyway, the brass seem to think I have an aptitude! He laughed. An aptitude for altitude.’
‘Yes, but…what’d you know about navigation?’
‘That’s why I’m learning.’
‘Star charts and dead reckoning?’
‘It’s cleverer than that these days. There’s a thing they call AI–airborne interception–shouldn’t tell you, because it’s hush-hush, but that’s what I’m off to learn in Scotland. I already did a radio direction-finding course at Yatesbury.’
He’d kept mighty quiet about that. Yatesbury, where I’d sat in the churchyard with Mr Cromley, specialized in training for wireless and signals. It was so close to Avebury that some of the officers stationed there had made their living quarters on a caravan site behind Rawlins’s garage. The bar of the Red Lion was stuffy with their pipe smoke and beer fumes.
A navigator. Davey had always been a clever boy, good with maps, good with the size and shape and lay of things. But clever boys still got killed. Not much that brains could do to stop a line of tracer coming through the skin of a Wellington or a Beaufighter and splatting them.
Wasn’t much I could do, was there? If I’d begged, wouldn’t have stopped him.
‘You got a death wish,’ I said. ‘Or worse. You any idea what I see on the wards every day? Air crew without faces. Bald and shiny as babies, their pretty ears and noses burned away, eyes gummy slits. Want to end up like that?’
‘Ninety-six out of every hundred planes come back safe. Chances are…’
‘That’s what the body-snatchers at Bomber Command tell the lambs. You can work all sorts of fakery with numbers. Chances are terrible. Average plane lasts seventeen ops. You know that–you send the bloody things out factory fresh and get ‘em back in bits. Like I get the airmen.’ Now all he showed me was the back of his head, every prickle on his close-barbered neck sulking.
‘When are you going?’ I asked.
‘Monday’
‘Monday? This Monday?’
‘Tonight’s goodbye.’
It was my turn to look out of the window; couldn’t think of anything to say. The hedges on either side of the car were dripping with may blossom. He pressed the starter button and the engine caught. Made a sound like the end of the world, that car, with the heavy vibrating piece of steel on the roof shattering the peace of the night. He rammed it into gear, and it bumped forward on the pocked road surface. A bit up the lane was a gateway where he usually turned the car round.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go home yet.’
He put his foot on the brake, and the car came to a juddering halt.
‘Fran. You know they got a word for girls like you?’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ I said. ‘Take me up to where your city of lights is.’
The car bounced along the ruts of the Ridgeway towards Barbury, its steel roof creaking and groaning. It hadn’t rained for a while and the track was solid, though winter had been wet and cold. Below us lay the airfield at Wroughton, a great dark hidden thing, no lights showing from its camouflaged hangars where planes slept in their maintenance cradles. Davey stopped at the bottom of the slope leading up to Barbury.
‘Are we there?’
‘It’s a bit further. Have to walk the rest–don’t want anyone to hear us coming or we might be shot as spies.’
‘You joking?’ The cooling engine ticked in the silence. ‘Love-a-duck, you’re not!
‘Still keen to see it?’
‘Try and stop me.’
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Path’ll be hobbledy-gobbledy’
‘I can manage.’ I was in dance