Sandlands Page 10

  ‘Hi!’ Poppy hailed him as he drew nearer. ‘Which is it? Film extra, or ghost?’

  The boy laughed – or if he was a man it was a boyish laugh. Then again, it could have been the uniform that marked him down as young. The pilots of Bomber Command, who flew from here and died in Germany and Holland or in the dark North Sea, had mostly just been boys. ‘Neither, actually. I work at the Cold War Museum, over in the old command post. Just as a volunteer, you know, but we like to look the part.’

  She’d bet they did. So no ghost, then, but only an aircraft enthusiast – a plane spotter with an upmarket anorak. Perhaps even a war enthusiast, she thought with a sinking heart – though she’d been picturing the wrong war.

  ‘How about you?’ He had stopped beside her and turned; the silhouette acquired colour and definition, and she took in sandy brows over flecked hazel eyes. ‘Have you come to see the museum?’

  It was her turn to laugh this time. ‘No – not that. No, I’ve actually come to look for a flower.’

  A war enthusiast, perhaps, but he did have nice eyes. Words came tripping back from a song her mum used to sing to her at bath time when she was a kid. Gone for soldiers, every one. And then, close at their heels, another line: When will they ever learn?

  A member of the public had phoned it in. All too often, she’d been sent on a wild goose chase (though not as literally as in the case of her colleague, Andy the bird man) by an excited and well-meaning caller, but this time it had the ring of credibility about it. Silene conica – the sand catchfly or striped corn catchfly. To many people it might be just another member of the campion family, an insignificant roadside weed, but for anyone who knew anything at all about native plants, or had opened a basic field guide, there was little chance of error. Those distinctive striated seed heads, fat and onion-domed, like extravagant turbans or the minarets of old Istanbul: there really could be no mistaking them.

  The woman had sounded plausible – confident but not overbearing – and the habitat was right, too. Next to the old runway, she said, near where there’d been some recent digging. Silene conica favoured sandy soils in coastal regions: dunes and the landward margins of beaches, or the light, well-draining soil of the Suffolk sandlings. It grew most readily in bare or sparsely vegetated areas and had a particular liking for ground that had been disturbed by man. Like me, she thought, like my own name. The poppies of Flanders.

  ‘A flower?’ The sandy eyebrows lifted a quizzical half-centimetre.

  ‘I’m a botanist,’ she said, trying to block out the note of apology, or at least of self-consciousness. ‘I work for the county Wildlife Trust.’ As if by way of credentials, she unzipped her backpack to reveal the camera and the roll of plastic warning tape, fluorescent orange zigzagged with black.

  ‘More like SOCO.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  The costume airman nodded at the contents of her pack. ‘Like on the telly. A police officer, you know. Come to seal off the scene of the crime.’

  ‘I hope not.’ She was grinning, but it was no joke, really, the damage people did, deciding to pick wild flowers. ‘Quite the reverse. I want to protect it, if it’s what we think it is. Look—’ He seemed a willing sort, and his job was helping visitors, wasn’t it? ‘I wonder if you might be able to point me in the right direction. Our informant said it’s growing by the main runway. Maybe somewhere they’ve been doing some excavation?’

  Turning to peer screw-eyed into the sun, back in the direction of the buildings, he gave a nod. ‘For the remains of a Lanc.’ At her hesitation, he looked back towards her. ‘A Lancaster bomber. From a wartime crash.’

  That would be it, she supposed. ‘So, whereabouts...?’

  He swung on the heels of his flying boots. ‘I’ll show you.’

  It was Silene conica. Just a small, scattered colony, no more than a dozen flowering spikes, close to some mounds where the earth had evidently been turned over and then piled back.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ Poppy yelped with delight. ‘It’s actually it. Sand catchfly is its name. This is the first time it’s been spotted here on the base, though they’ve had some on the reserve at North Warren, and up at Minsmere, too, just a few specimens. It’s pretty scarce – fewer than sixty sites recorded nationwide last year...’

  He wasn’t really listening. His eyes had strayed towards the perimeter fence, the wire mesh and concrete pillars, tilted outwards at the top to support three parallel strands of razor wire.

  ‘I came here when I was a baby,’ she said, caught off balance herself by the sudden change of tack. ‘In a papoose, and then in a buggy, later on. My mother was a peacenik, back in the eighties. CND and all that.’

  Ban the bomb. Mum’s placard was self-consciously retro, even then, among the others with their No nukes! and Send Maggie on a cruise. Funny to think the familiar photos in the album back at home were taken somewhere out along that fence, just outside the wire. To think of what was happening inside the wire then, too – so secret, so deadly – and now she could walk in the front gate and stroll about photographing flowers.

  There was one particular snap she’d always loved: it showed her mother gazing dreamily half away from the camera, hair loose about her shoulders and topped with a daisy chain, the perfect hippy chick, like something out of Woodstock in 1969. And she was in the picture, too, baby Poppy at a few months old, although you couldn’t see her face, which was hooded by the shawl which bound her, squaw-style, to her mother’s body. Except it wasn’t a shawl, exactly, but one of those Middle Eastern scarves, a keffiyeh – worn, no doubt, in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, but strangely at odds with the floral skirt and Indian cheesecloth blouse, the strings of wooden beads and threaded seashells. Behind Mum’s head, in and out of the mesh of the fence, were woven posies of flowers – cranesbill and scabious and meadow clary and more she couldn’t identify from the fuzzy photograph – like people leave at the roadside, on a fence or lamp post, at a place where a child has been knocked down and killed.

  ‘Well, they’ve all gone now.’

  She blinked at the young volunteer and slowly nodded her head, uncertain quite what she was agreeing had gone: the American bombers, the peace protestors or the flowers.

  * * *

  It was a perfect morning for cycling. Overhead the larks were already peppering the sky with their barrage of twittering as Lilian bowled along the Tunstall Lane. The temperature must have fallen during a clear night and a dawn mist lingered over the fields. The pilots in last night’s raids would have had a good sight of their targets, but been sitting ducks for the enemy ack ack; she hoped that any stragglers had managed to land before the mist had formed. When she reached the road that stretched straight ahead into the cool darkness of Rendlesham Forest, Lilian rose on her pedals in her old lace-up brogues, which she’d had since school and weren’t fit to be seen but were the only thing she owned you could possibly ride a bike in. She’d always raced when she got to the woods, right from being small, fleeing from storybook bogeymen even before there were Nazi spies and paratroopers to haunt the edges of the imagination.

  She propped up her bike by the main gate and walked past the barrier, keeping her eyes down as the corporal on guard duty glanced up from his Picture Post to give the compulsory wolf whistle. At least there would be no whistling in the mess – the commissioned officers were too well-bred for that, even now that the cumulating losses meant they were recruiting pilots from all sorts of walks of life. She’d shared a smoke with one last week who’d been a brewer’s drayman back in civvy street. ‘I’ve swapped four hooves for four props,’ he’d said, as he leaned in to light her cigarette. ‘But I know which I’d rather be relying on, if it comes to limping home on three.’

  It wasn’t to say they didn’t look, though – men are men, her mum always told her, and even officers have eyes. Some of them liked to rib her, too, and try to make her blush; Lilian hated how easily she blushed. She wasn’t a child, after all, she was seventeen. Boys she’d been at schoo
l with were out in Italy and North Africa now, driving tanks, or down in submarines and goodness knows what else, and she was doing her bit, as far as you could, stuck out here in Suffolk, helping on the farm now that Arthur and Geoff were gone, and cleaning the mess hut and cookhouse at the base. Seventeen – but she knew she must look younger in her well-worn cotton print dress, let out on the bust and hips and down at the hem until there were no seams left to turn. On mornings like this, after a raid, the pilots rose late and would still be lingering over a second mug of tea while she got going with her bucket and mop; she tucked in her tummy and pushed out her breasts in the new brassiere she’d had from Auntie Vi in London, a proper bullet bra that made her feel like Veronica Lake, until she had to put on her old dress and cardigan, and her flat school brogues.

  There was one particular one: the others called him Charlie, which baffled her at first, but it turned out his plane was C for Charlie and his real name was Joe. He had blond hair that flopped down over his forehead however much he tried to slick it back, and greyish, greenish eyes. Nice eyes. Joseph Woodhall was his full name – she loved how it sounded – and he came from a place called Market Drayton in Shropshire. It was so near to Wales, he said, that on a quiet Sunday you could hear the singing. Joe was always saying things like that, funny things, so she never quite knew if he was joking or not. He reckoned it was 192 miles by road from Market Drayton to Bentwaters, or 170 as the Lancaster flies, which meant they could get there in forty-five minutes at normal cruising speed, have a pot of coffee and a chocolate Kunzle cake in the Red Lion Hotel, and be back in time for lunch.

  ‘Go on with you,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t fancy it? Ah well, you may be wise. They’re mainly beetroot and gravy browning, anyway.’

  ‘Mainly...?’ Confused, she was probably beetroot herself.

  ‘The Kunzle cakes.’

  It wouldn’t do to look round for him – wouldn’t do to be looking round at the officers at all, bold as brass the way some girls would. That’s not how Lilian had been brought up. But she could sneak a quick glance about while she fetched her bits and pieces from the closet, and there he was, playing cards with T for Tommy.

  When she went round the back to empty her bucket at the outside drain the way Sergeant Bulmer liked her to do, Joe was suddenly there behind her, up so close she could smell the rolling tobacco, and something harsher, like carbolic. And somehow he’d got hold of flowers – a great overflowing bunch of them like a proper bouquet from the florist, as if she’d know what to do with flowers when she was meant to be cleaning. Except they weren’t real flowers, of course, not the hothouse kind or even from someone’s garden, they were just wild flowers he must have gone out and picked earlier. Weeds, really, her mum would say. But they were all colours, bright as you like. The blue ones she knew were cornflowers, but she didn’t know the other sorts.

  ‘Call yourself a country girl?’ he teased her. He seemed to know them all, and the names as he reeled them off to her were so beautiful it was just as if he was reading her poetry: knotted cranesbill and corn chamomile, arrowgrass and fragrant agrimony, musk mallow, ragged robin, wild marjoram and mignonette.

  * * *

  It was a perfect morning for cycling. Rosa loved those days in early summer when a clear night left a trail of dawn mist to be burned off by the brand new sun. The sort of days, she thought as she bowled along the Tunstall lane, when you almost couldn’t believe how fragile all this was, this beautiful, precarious balance of gases and liquids, or water and air, of soil and plants and animals which sustained the life of this planet of ours. It was hard to remember that the sun might one day, perhaps one day soon, be blotted out by a lethal poison cloud unleashed by the gigajoules of explosive power, the limitless megatons of chemical death, stockpiled on either side of the Berlin Wall – including at Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth, even if not yet here at Bentwaters.

  She could still not quite accustom herself to riding a bike with two. Poppy was too small as yet for the baby seat which Rosa had fitted during a burst of energy in the early weeks of her pregnancy, so she rode with her strapped against her breast, the scarf wound tightly around them both. Bound there, Poppy almost seemed to become a part of her again, less the small independent person she was slowly and perplexingly coming to know and more the extra weight she had been for the long months in the womb, tipping her forwards disproportionately over the handlebars. Heat, too – she was aware of her as heat, that busy, concentrated infant heat, warmer than her own blood – and a heartbeat, merging with her own. This was for her, the protest, the campaigning: keeping the sun undarkened, keeping the earth alive for Poppy. As she reached the leafy fringes of Rendlesham Forest, she rose on her pedals in her buffalo sandals, pushing down harder with each stroke until her anklets jangled.

  She dragged her bicycle behind some trees and leant it up with a tangle of others, then stood straight for a moment to ease the crick from her spine and adjust her weight to the vertical. The scarf shaded Poppy’s closed eyes and puckered, slightly open mouth as she slept on, re-dreaming the lulling motion of her ride. Lightly, Rosa touched one finger to the downy head, as close as she ever came to prayer.

  By the wire, there was quite a crowd already: Kate and Anne-Marie and Linda and most of the Aldeburgh group, some teenagers she didn’t recognise, and a couple of carloads from Christian CND in Woodbridge, complete with doved and rainbowed banner. Older, most of these, and standing slightly apart, looking awkward – but Christians could always be relied upon for singing, once everything got going.

  ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ That was Rosa’s favourite; it had so much more to say with its gentle, haunting lyrics than the angry chanting that Linda always liked to start. They were all going to link hands, they’d decided, around the perimeter fence, like they’d done at Greenham last year when she didn’t yet know she was carrying Poppy, and thirty thousand women gathered to ‘embrace the base’ – even if here, today, they were closer to thirty than thirty thousand, forming no complete, unbroken circle but only a brief and flimsy chain. They sat cross-legged on the strip of gravel beneath the wire, its stones already half reclaimed by grass and wild flowers, like the graveyards in the song. One of the teenagers had picked some and threaded them through the fence, and then they all had done the same, so that the mesh was wreathed and garlanded in green. Rosa had taken daisies and slit the juicy stalks with her fingernails, pushing in the severed ends and sliding them through to the hilt of the flower heads, stringing them together like the hand-linked chain of protestors, and had laid it around her head.

  ‘Uh-oh. Look out, here comes trouble.’ Linda’s voice held a note that was more of excited glee than warning; she was always spoiling for a fight, was Linda.

  The company loosed hands and turned, some of them standing up and brushing themselves down, as the young serviceman approached. He was SP, by his uniform and beret flash – security police rather than an airman. They were always the ones sent out to deal with demonstrations.

  ‘Hello there, you guys’ was his opening – carefully casual, unconfrontational. ‘Lovely day for it.’

  Like nightclub doormen, they were always taught to keep things light. This one, though, seemed almost to mean it. He hardly looked older than nineteen or twenty, with Huck Finn freckles and a flop of dark hair in front, even though he was shaved to regulation rawness at the back. And his eyes held a genuinely friendly light. Nice eyes, thought Rosa.

  ‘Not thinking of making any trouble, I hope?’

  ‘We’ve every right to be here,’ said Linda, although he’d given no indication that he thought otherwise. ‘A right of peaceful protest. You can’t make us leave.’

  ‘No indeed, ma’am.’ He played it deadpan, but Rosa had an inkling he might be laughing at her friend. ‘As long as you don’t start making free with the wire cutters.’

  Linda harrumphed, trying to look as if she just might do that. One of the Aldeburgh contingent, a man called Terry, began to
make a speech, all the familiar arguments about escalation and proliferation, the risk of accidents, and destruction of the planet. Some people thought you had to try and convert them, even the military: sow seeds of change from within. But this was hardly the way; the SP’s eyes had lost their warm and open look, grown guarded. It was in the hope of bringing back the gleam that Rosa unwound the chain of daisies from her hair, and held it out to him, fingers reaching out to touch his through the wire.

  ‘What d’you do that for?’ Linda demanded, later. They had moved to a quiet spot in the shelter of the trees so that Rosa could feed Poppy. Linda was eating her sandwiches. ‘I mean – a daisy chain,’ she said, through a mouthful of humous and alfalfa. ‘Like some dorky kid at primary school. ‘Bloody ’ell, Rosa’ – they’ll think we’re all feeble-minded.’

  ‘Because he was cute.’ Not the whole truth, perhaps, but a partial version of it that Linda might understand. Peace offering would have sounded trite, or even like derision, in the circumstances.

  Another harrumph – a speciality of Linda’s. ‘Cute or not – he’s on the other side. He’s what we’re fighting against, for God’s sake. The enemy.’

  Rosa watched in entrancement the slow, methodical working of her daughter’s mouth at her nipple, felt reverberate through her body the sweet, deep, primal tug, as old as the tides. Wasn’t that the point, she thought – not having sides? Not having enemies?

  Obliquely, she found herself saying, ‘My mother dated an airman. A British airman, that is, back in the war when Bomber Command were here. At least, I think she did.’

  Linda put down her sandwich. ‘Lilian? In the war? Was she old enough?’

  ‘She’d have been seventeen.’ Just a child.

  ‘But why only “think”?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know... She never talked about it, you see, not until after the first stroke, and by then she was confused.’ The impaired blood flow had dragged her mother back in time, back to when she was young and living at home, as a child. She talked about the pigs, though the farm was broken up and sold in 1947. ‘She didn’t know where she was or who she was, who any of us were. She kept calling my dad by other names, you know, towards the end. Joe, she kept saying, and even, once, Charlie. His name was Fred. Imagine that – thirty years married, and your wife doesn’t know your name.’