I took it and my hands didn’t shake. I hadn’t lost my nerve – I was angry. Not just at the Germans, our enemy. I was angry at my commanding officer, at Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell, for being so blind to what we were up against, and at Coastal Command itself, whoever they were, making impossible rules in some comfortable headquarters in England while we bled our lives out in unforgiving sky and sea.
I tried to smoke. Phyllis passed me her ashtray. I was nearly angry at her, too, behaving herself and reporting to them. But she was good at her job, unlike Cromwell; she’d been with us since June and she knew us well.
‘When we fly that high the mission is absolutely pointless, but when we come in at a low level to bomb the German ships, we get shot up by their anti-aircraft guns,’ I said bitterly. ‘I just want an advantage, you know? I want to know where their submarines are, or if there are night fighters about, before they’re on top of us. Some wee thing. One thing that we can do better than the Germans. One surprising smack in their faces.’
‘We stopped the invasion,’ Phyllis said. ‘You helped too, two months ago when we were fighting the Battle of Britain. We made them back off. That was a smack in their faces.’
‘Now they’re bombing our cities to blazes – that’s not backing off!’
‘We all want revenge,’ Phyllis said softly.
That surprised me a little. I didn’t think of earnest, diligent Flight Officer Pennyworth as someone who had unwholesome emotions that might involve a thirst for blood. I glanced up at her, thinking she might be offering mechanical sympathy to another shot-down airman – or I suppose I should say shot up, not shot down, as I’d managed to bring the crate back and land it in one piece.
Her eyes were red and her mouth was set in a stubborn, steely pout. I guess Flight Officer Pennyworth got the job partly because she didn’t cry easily. Maybe she did want revenge.
‘We’ll win,’ Phyllis said firmly. ‘We’ll keep fighting, and someday we’ll win fair and square.’
I’d let my cigarette go out. I dumped it in the ashtray. What had Cromwell told me?
We need to change our tactics.
‘I don’t want to win fair and square any more,’ I said through my teeth. ‘I want to cheat.’
Louisa Adair:
Daddy said I lost my Jamaican accent in one year. One year at the rather posh London school where my mother taught music, and I had a polite accent I’d picked up from my schoolteachers. I didn’t even know it was happening. There wasn’t any other obvious way to blend in, with my light brown skin and springing dark brown hair, tamed into plaits by Mummy and then into tight rolls by me when I got older. ‘Me boonoonoonoos country gal is turning into a little English lady,’ Daddy teased. But it stopped the other girls from teasing.
In November 1940, my polite English accent came in useful.
I was fifteen years old and both my parents were killed in a single month by German explosives, Mummy in an air raid and Daddy in a sea battle, thousands of miles apart. My school closed because of the Blitz even before Mummy was killed, but I was old enough that I didn’t need to stay in school anyway. Now I was stuck by myself in Mummy’s rented attic room surrounded by falling bombs. Our elderly landladies looked in on me and made sure I didn’t starve, but all I did in the first shocked horrible weeks after Mummy’s death was bury my nose in books whose orphaned heroines got happy endings.
I reread A Little Princess, Jane Eyre, and Anne of Green Gables, but my literary friends began to feel disappointing. They didn’t have to cope with air raids. Nobody was rude to them for being foreign. Sara Crewe was born in India and spoke Hindustani, but she still looked English. When people shooed her away it wasn’t because she was brown.
I had a bit more money than Sara Crewe or Jane Eyre or Anne Shirley, that was true. There was twenty-five pounds in Mummy’s post office account. But it wouldn’t last forever. I had to have something to do when it ran out, or I would end up living in an air-raid shelter on an Underground platform. The only person I could go to was Granny Adair, Daddy’s mother in Jamaica, and how was I going to get back to Jamaica, past the U-boats and destroyers? The City of Benares, full of evacuated children, was torpedoed by a German submarine in September!
I knew I couldn’t go back. We’d moved to England when I was twelve, and I knew, because of the dustbin of rubbish true facts in the back of my head, that I could not live with Granny Adair. I’d have to earn my keep there by picking up stones in her tiny field of sugarcane, or herding her goats. At best, taking in washing, which in the Jamaica bush means scrubbing sheets in the river and walking six miles with a laundry basket on your head. Three years in London had ruined me for such a life. No, if I am honest, it was Mummy’s fault, with music lessons and library books and her pretty tailored suits. Even in our Jamaican bungalow we’d had a piano and a veranda and a little garden of English roses. And we left Kingston because Mummy was afraid of the workers’ strikes and the Caribbean riots. Daddy grew up in the bush, but he went to sea when he was fifteen.
At fifteen! My age in November 1940. You can do that if you’re a boy – even a West Indian boy can do that. The rules won’t let any kind of girl do that. And I was a West Indian girl.
What can a West Indian girl do at fifteen?
A girl whose parents are both killed by enemy action and who burns, burns to fight back? A schoolgirl with no skills who stands in the street watching the vapour trails of the fighter planes and wants to be up there with them so badly that it hurts?
Some of those children on the City of Benares were rescued from the sea. They were the ones who hung on, who fought to stay awake in the cold water and who wouldn’t let go of the wreckage that kept them afloat.
I am like those children. Not the ones who sank. The ones who fought.
Rules are made to be broken, Mummy always told me. She believed that you can get away with breaking rules if you are polite about it, and underneath her cultured British charm my mother was the boldest of rule-breakers, a white Englishwoman who married a black Jamaican. But she was carefully polite. That’s how she got around our landladies in London, with harp music and flute music and smart, stylish hats. Mummy had always been there to protect me from the rules. Now I was going to have to break them on my own.
I had to find work. At my age it wasn’t going to be war work, but I had to pay rent and buy food. Sensible positions such as ‘salesgirl in record shop’ and ‘music teacher’s assistant’ weren’t the answer because time and again people made it clear they didn’t want to hire someone with a tropical complexion, even a pale one – light brown, dark brown, it was all the same to the English. ‘The Caribbean sun makes people lazy,’ explained one well-meaning person as she turned me away.
And Mummy had trained me so carefully to be polite that I thanked her as I left.
Afterwards I sat on a bench by the Serpentine and cried.
But then I found Nancy Campbell’s notice in the newspaper. Her old aunt Jane needed someone to look after her; I had to ring a number in Scotland to ask about it. And that was perfect, because over the telephone I was able to get around the rules by invisibly using my most practical, useful skill – my polite English accent.