The Spindrifter
By Michael Goodall
The opening and closing quotations
are from Henry Vaughan, ‘The Retreate’.
Extracts from Peter Pan
by J.M.Barrie are by kind permission of the Great Ormond Street Hospital
for Children.
For Elizabeth, with love, yet hardly a dent in the debt I owe.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Happy those early dayes!
When I
Shin’d in my Angell-infancy.
Before I understood this place’
When the first crash came she was on her knees, sliding a finger round the inside of a jam jar for the last smears. By the second, an instant later, she was already up and running, bare feet thumping across the grass, still fiercely clutching the jar despite the screaming whistle and roar of explosions around her.
She scrambled down into the cool darkness of the Anderson shelter and scurried to the farthest end, away from the door and the noise like thunder, wrapping herself into a small, tight ball.
Within moments her mother broke into the damp murkiness and flung herself to the ground with a yelp. Together they lay motionless as the bombs tore into the landscape around them. It was as though the fragile tin bolt-hole had been snatched up and shaken by an enraged hand. In the brief lulls between the deafening bursts the girl thought she could hear her mother’s heartbeat drumming against the floor. The woman stretched out and anxiously encircled the child’s thin ankle with a moist hand. There had been no warning this time, no siren wail floating eerily across the valley, nothing at all.
At the touch of her mother’s hand the girl stared out wide-eyed. The woman’s face was hidden but through the gloom she could see that the golden hair was flecked with dirt and that she was clutching something, wrapped hastily in a tea towel, close to her. The girl knew it was the big photograph of Daddy, the one that hung in the hall, all smart in his blue uniform and shiny peaked cap. It was the first thing you saw as you came into the house. She always brought it. Every time there was an air raid the three of them were there together.
The woman stared at her wedding ring, concentrating on it to shut out the air-splitting din but it would not be held back. Then she thought she could hear the aeroplane moving away to the east, floating higher with a new lightness, turning back to sea. What she did not know was that it was a holed stray, cut off from the main thrust of the raid; a string of jagged punctures along its fuselage, chunks of aluminium pulled off by its own hurtling speed as the wounded pilot arbitrarily released the few remaining bombs. Already far behind and below it were the billowing parachutes of the escaped crew. Then it would wheel away, trailing burning oil, and out at sea, five minutes into the future, plunge down and hit the water with a booming slap, settling briefly on the surface before starting a slow, spiralling descent with its lone dead pilot to nestle forever in the weed, sand and gloom of the English Channel. Above, a pall of smoke drifted across the silvered sea, a momentary hissing on the water, an angered sea god’s disapproval.
Those last bombs shook the earth below and the air around them. A scorching blast filled their mouths and eyes with gritty smoke. They both stayed completely still, caught in their awkward positions, and stifled their choking as if the slightest cough might somehow give them away, might challenge the beast.
The woman imagined she could hear Hadley, their home, ripped suddenly apart by the bombs so casually jettisoned. She could hear the roof slates rippling and crashing to the ground, walls crumbling in a rumble of showering bricks and plaster. She saw the precious tea service sliding and smashing into a thousand fragments against the kitchen flagstones, furniture smashed and burning, charred wooden rafters poking through the remains of the roof. She had seen in town the great mounds of rubble and wreckage after raids like this. Houses, streets, mangled beyond recognition so that even the familiar was utterly transformed, beyond redemption, incapable of ever having been the scene of normal life. It was not England. It was some hellish place beyond imagining. She began to weep silently and, as she did, the sudden, sure and entirely practical knowledge that she had left the wireless blaring compounded the nightmare. She wept, accompanied by a thin rain of falling earth beating a brief, irregular jazzbeat on the roof of the shelter.
The little girl, who could not really remember a time before the bombs, was thinking of her father and how it must be worse for him. She was remembering when he had last been home from the sea. They had taken a picnic to the nearby green slopes overlooking a sea blue with the promise of summer but grimly barricaded, fortified by much more than castles of sand. She couldn’t remember paddling in the sea but could recall, just, Daddy swimming far out one day and her being frightened. Nor could she remember making sandcastles although she had seen children in picture books making them and they looked happy. Daddy had taken a photograph of her at the picnic and, when it came back from the chemist’s shop, she looked squinty-faced and serious in it. She asked if there were pirates at sea and he had laughed.
‘Pirates? Hundreds of ‘em. And smugglers and cut-throats.’
She wanted to know what the big things sticking out of the water were for. He said to keep Adolf out. Then he said that one day soon he would teach her to swim. She asked if the water was cold and again he laughed, leant forward and wiped the remains of the picnic from her face with a big, white handkerchief.
‘Not really. When you get used to it.’
‘And are there monsters?’ But already he had turned to her mother and did not hear her.
High above, a fragment ripped from the stricken aircraft completed a graceful curve and, gathering speed, plummeted down and sliced through the thin roof of the shelter with a sudden, metal-rending wrench. Hardly bigger than a man’s hand, it thudded into the floor, the rushing noise of it filling the cramped space. They both cried out but, as they looked up and saw the unexpectedly small hole, their cries became sobs of relief and they fell into each other’s arms, the photograph pressed between them.
A triangular, five-inch patch of daylight had joined them underground, stabbing a beam of light to the floor. Unconsciously the mother rubbed her child’s back comfortingly. It was not until they were once again outside, blinking against the sun and registering with incredulity that Hadley was completely untouched, that the woman saw the weeping blood on the girl’s arm. The plunging fragment had scored an arc, several inches long, on the inside of her right forearm, as if the white skin had been gently touched by a gull’s feather dipped in red. Though bloody, it was not a deep wound and the woman hugged the child, uncaring of the blood staining her dress. The child’s fingers finally released the jam jar and it fell to the ground with a dull thump, unnaturally loud in the newly reclaimed silence. Then the woman unwrapped the photograph and put it carefully down before loosely bandaging the wound with the tea towel.
And out at sea as
the plane crashes, a sound like the crack of a great sail turning into
the wind rushes back over the waves towards the primed, deserted shore.