Sandlands Read online

  I knew I wanted to fly. I always knew, even before Johnnie joined up; even before that, when we were boys and it was me with the Biggles books and the picture of a Fairey Seafox on my bedroom wall out of Practical Mechanics. And when war looked likely, I knew it was a Spit or a Hurricane I wanted to fly, not a Wellington or a Lanc. There were bombing stations closer to home – over Rendlesham way at Bentwaters, and inland at Parham – but that was never for me.

  You might put the choice down to simple cowardice, I suppose, although the boys who bought it in Fighter Command weren’t noticeably fewer than among the bomber crews, especially in that late summer of 1940. If your number was up, it was up, whatever your mission and mob: that’s how we all came to look at it. Death was no respecter of divisional demarcation, any more than of braid on a sleeve. But still... in a Spit you felt your life was just a little more in your own hands. With luck and a fair wind, you could dodge and dink and weave your way out of trouble nine times out of ten. And the tenth? Well, if I had to go west in a burning cockpit or a plummeting spiral of smoke, I’d sooner it was over friendly inshore waters or a patchwork of English fields.

  What do they see when they look down, the circling rooks? It’s a different world, up there on the wing. Most of the time on an op you didn’t look down at all, except to get a fix on your position, and to peer for the flickering goosenecks that marked the runway on your way back in. But sometimes, just once or twice that I recall, when the expected German fighters were late to the party or things went suddenly quiet, there was time to take stock of things beyond the task in hand. Beyond the immediate skies around you, your gun sights, and staying alive. Once, we were scrambled in the late afternoon. It must have been August or September and the sun was already low, turning heaven and earth the same soft, luminous gold. We’d flown north, hugging the shoreline, but travelled no great distance, and it seemed to have been a false alarm: for once, we had the skies to ourselves. I took a long, looping turn to the west ahead of the others, coasting at about ten thousand feet, and an unexpected sense of peace settled over me. The goggles, the hot rubber of the oxygen mask, usually so encumbering, were temporarily forgotten. Even the roar and judder of the engine seemed to fade to a distance. There was nothing but me and my kite and the empty air.

  Beneath me were fields, some dark and mottled with stubble, others the yellowish green of late summer pasture, all criss-crossed by the darker lines of hedgerows and studded here and there with the neat circle of a tree, as if a child had drawn round a sixpence. There were few clouds, and those few were mere puffs, drifting high above my own altitude, so that as I banked and then straightened from my turn, shadows flickered briefly across the Perspex canopy of the Spit, and ran and jumped over the tapestry below.

  That other world, the solid world of soil and wood and hearth and home, was like a shadow of itself, a projection on a screen. It could have been a thousand miles away, or a thousand years. Nothing in that evening landscape moved to give it life and substance – until suddenly, beyond my left wingtip, a miniature figure swung into view, straddling the midline of a field where it changed from the dull grey-brown of stubble to a deeper, richer russet, ridged in black. At first I had no sense that the figure was in motion, so slowly did it creep along the line of the last furrow, edging forward no faster than a sluggish beetle, dazed by the sun. I took another turn, dropping my height a little, to gaze down until I could make out the broad backs of a pair of chestnut horses, the glinting Y-shape of the plough and, behind it, just visible, the dot of a man’s head. Somewhere in the plunging fathoms of space between me and the ploughman a flock of birds were drifting, no doubt scanning the freshly upturned earth, appearing from my elevation as no more than a pattern of moving speckles. Maybe it was the timelessness of the image – with diesel so scarce in those days, it was not unusual to see farmers resorting to the old ways of working – or the perfect stillness of the gilded evening, split only by the rush of my own machine, but that momentary scene seemed to me somehow to be eternal, to be out of the reach of war, safe from the horrors of dogfights and ack ack, of air raids and bomb blast, of gunfire and shrapnel and burning and death.

  Only once have I ever seen one up close enough to touch – a rook, that is, or possibly a crow. I don’t think even Will could have said for certain, not after it had tangled with Johnnie’s port side cannon mounting, coming in to land from an early patrol. ‘Lucky it didn’t strike the prop,’ I remember Johnnie saying, swinging the corpse by the legs like a chicken, and the Wingco whistled. ‘Lucky for which one of you?’ he said. Its wings dangled out and down at drunken angles but the feathers held their gloss, shining blue and purple as well as black.

  This afternoon Will came over and took me for a drive in that little Vauxhall of his. I don’t get out as much as all that, since I’ve been in the Lilacs, but Will’s a good boy and comes when he can. He knows I like to drive round by the old house and sometimes, like today, we stop for a half-pint at the Ship.

  It was well after four when we started back and they like you to be in by five for tea. Early hours, they keep. We went round by the level crossing and Willett’s farm, through Stone Common and up towards the church, and there, over Silly Hill, the sky was full of birds. Will saw me looking, and he was looking too; he pulled over on to the verge and we sat for a while to watch. The hedge was low just there but you still couldn’t see the field, not from sitting in the car, so there’s no knowing what it was that drew them. It must have been something, though: there were dozens of them, circling round and round above the crest of the hill.

  I thought at first that it was just the rooks, because the wheeling outlines showed up black against the pale sky; the whiter flashes I caught as they turned I put down to a trick of the light. It takes my eyes much longer than it once did to adjust for distance, and accommodate to darkness, or brightness out of doors. I was passed twenty/twenty by the eye doc when I signed up, but I’d be no darned use for night ops now. After a minute or two, though, I got my sights trained in on them, and I could see they weren’t all the same. There were two different colours there, black birds and white. Dark and light: friend or foe, good luck or bad. And two different wing shapes, as well. The rooks’ wings were broad and straight, splay-tipped, while the other birds, which were grey on top and white below, were longer and more tapered in the wing, with an angle back towards the tail.

  ‘Black-headed gulls,’ said Will.

  On the walls of the Nissen hut, above our bunks, we had posters showing different fighter planes in silhouette. The Hawker Hurricane, the Spitfire. And the other lot, of course: the Heinkel He 112, the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Messerschmitt Bf 109. We had to be able to identify them in a fraction of a second, through cloud and haze, at dawn or dusk, or coming straight out of a blazing sun.

  ‘...except their heads are only black in summer,’ Will was saying. ‘Or actually, even then, more like a very dark brown.’

  The Heinkel’s wings, according to the manuals, resembled those of an upside-down seagull – but in fact we rarely came across them. Once or twice, perhaps, in some early scraps, but after that it was always the Messerschmitts. They were nifty little craft, those 109s. They could dive away at the steepest angles and never seemed to stall – whereas with a Spit, if you pulled back too far the whole crate would start juddering or the engine cut out and you’d be forced to ease up. But our lot, both Hurricanes and Spits, were tighter in the circle. In a dogfight you could take a sharp turn to left or right and you’d soon shake the beggars off your tail.

  The brow of Silly Hill was some way off from where Will had stopped the car, but when he wound the windows down we could hear the birds’ cries carrying down on a gusty breeze: the low, rasping engine note of the rooks’ caa caa and the higher pitched call of the gulls, which resembled no mechanical sound but had a piteous, almost human tone, like the distant voices of women and children, raised in inconsolable grief.

  Was it a dogfight we were witnessing there over the
hill? Were there battle patterns in the spiralling of the birds? You hear people talk about respect for the enemy, respect for our fellow flyers, but it wasn’t like that. There was no time for respect, or hatred either. Your mind was a blank. Everything went into automatic. The control stick, the rudder pedals and the dials, the meshwork of tracer, the cross hairs of the sights and your thumb on the fire button. I hope Johnnie had no time to think.

  It was early October, a Tuesday. A perfect English teatime, bright and breezy, much like today. We’d been sent to greet a formation of some twenty aircraft. Light bombers, mostly, with an escort of just half a dozen fighters, but those Dorniers were heavily armed and nearly as manoeuvrable as a 109. I’d been playing cat-and-mouse with one of the fighters; I’d got in a few short bursts but didn’t think I’d hit him. Johnnie was somewhere off my starboard wing. The afternoon sky, in memory, was unbroken blue. There was no flame and no black smoke: just a pale plume, as innocent as vapour, trailing out behind, and the gleam of sunlight on my brother’s plane as he fell like a stone.

  Silver Studded Blues

  If you want to see silver-studded blues, you need to look for ants.

  Symbiosis is what it’s called. The caterpillar emits a sound that replicates the black ants’ distress signal, prompting them to carry the caterpillar down into their nest, where they guard it and keep it safe from predators until it’s ready to pupate. In return, the caterpillar secretes a syrupy substance on which the ants can feed. Mutual dependence and mutual advantage. It’s win-win, as Dr Stebbings likes to say. He’s full of these little phrases, the kind you get in ‘motivational’ books, and he’s always cheerful and smiling, even when what he’s saying seems nothing to smile about.

  A lot of people, if you talk about symbiosis, either look at you blankly or else they think of wildlife programmes on the television: oxpecker birds that stand on the backs of rhinos on the African savannah and eat their ticks, or that David Attenborough film of the sea anemone and the hermit crab. I’ve noticed most people are only really interested in wildlife if they find it cute or funny, like the scuttling hermit crabs with their outsized sea anemone jockeys, waving their poisoned tentacles to fend off octopuses. And everyone thinks of symbiosis as something in nature, something out there. They never just think about themselves. But we’re all involved in symbiotic patterns all the time.

  There are the obvious ones, like dogs. Joan and I feed Mungo and provide him with shelter from the cold and wet, and a cool kitchen floor where he can stretch out flat on his belly in hot weather. We twist out his ticks when he’s been in the long grass at the bottom of my old garden next door. In return, he kills rats in the outhouse, and barks if anyone’s coming up the path. Except Dr Stebbings, that is. When Mungo hears the doctor’s car, he pricks his ears then lays his nose down on his paws, heaves his hairy ribs in a sigh and goes straight back to sleep.

  Then there’s the symbiosis that’s invisible. Sometimes it’s so small you’d need a microscope to see it, like the flora in our guts: a hundred trillion microorganisms, ten times more than the number of our own body’s cells, digesting what we can’t, releasing nutrients to feed both them and us. We couldn’t live without them. Sometimes it’s too big for us to bring in focus, like the delicate environmental balances we’re busy fouling up. One butterfly flaps its wings in the forests of the Amazon and there are hurricanes we can’t foresee. I talked to Joan about it, how they’d proved it all by mathematics, and she listened with a frown. ‘What if it’s here,’ she asked, ‘the butterfly? What if it’s here on Blaxhall Common?’ I told her I thought it must work here too. Maths is the same everywhere.

  There are five hundred species of bacteria in the average human gut, but only nineteen butterflies of the family Lycaenidae occurring in the British Isles. Nine of those are blue. Once it would have been ten, before the Mazarine blue died out. And nine could soon be down to seven, since both the long-tailed blue and short-tailed blue are now infrequent visitors.

  The small blue is barely blue at all but more of a dusty brown with just the hint of bluish veins radiating out from its body. The chalkhill blue is a pale turquoise shade that is almost aquamarine and, as its name suggests, is found in chalky uplands and not on Suffolk’s sandy soil. The remaining five varieties, though, are hard to tell apart. Small and inconspicuous compared with many native butterflies, with undersides of anonymous grey or brown, their habit of closing their wings when not in flight creates good camouflage. You’d mistake them for just another dead leaf – until they flicker open to reveal that splash of brilliant blue.

  The butterflies at the museum make me sad. We don’t have only native species here – the blues and whites and hairstreaks and fritillaries, the heaths and browns and tortoiseshells, the skippers and the swallowtail. Some of our specimens must actually once have flapped their wings in the Amazon – before being pinned to a card by Charles Randolph Badderley, English sportsman-naturalist (1847–1918). Their true colours are only to be guessed at, repainted in the mind’s eye from gaudy online images. Even the familiar ones are faded shadows of their real-life counterparts. The peacock, eyes dulled, has lost its vibrant plumage; the admiral’s red coat is rusty and threadbare; the purple emperor no longer boasts its deep Tyrian bloom. Sunlight and the years must have done their damage before the green felt flaps were added, too late, to the glass-topped wooden cabinets.

  Charles Randolph also collected birds, both native and exotic. He bequeathed to the museum four volumes of painstaking notes, observing, identifying and cataloguing his specimens before he shot and stuffed and then imprisoned them, each in its cold crystal dome. I used to hurry through the bird room when Mum left me there on Saturdays while she went to do the shopping. (Stay here and be a good boy.) They were too still, and I was afraid to meet the accusation in their hard, glass eyes. The only ones I could bear to look at were the goldfinches. Charles Randolph, having killed a family of five, allowed them to be together in a large, rectangular case, furnished with a branch to perch on and carpeted with leaves. Two were placed so close to each other that they almost touched, while another was captured with its wings half unfolded, as if it were about to rise in flight.

  Taking the job here made a lot of sense. I was familiar with the exhibits already. I could have recited the text on most of the caption cards by heart. I knew every photograph of old Saxmundham on the Green Room walls, from Edwardian sepia to fifties black-and-white. My favourite, from 1912, shows the colonnaded front of the museum itself, looking almost identical to its present self, while before it along the high street a herd of pigs pass by, driven, no doubt, by a farmer who is out of shot, but apparently strolling at their leisure. I could already have listed the Anglo-Saxon artefacts, rescued by archaeologists from the foundations of the new estate: the coins and clasp and rings, the bronze belt buckles, the spearhead and daggers which, according to the card, are ‘suggestive of a warrior’s grave’. My legs had stuck to the tip-up plastic seats in the small side room, on stuffy summer holiday afternoons, while I watched on an endless loop the flickery film of ‘Saxmundham at War’. I’d loitered inside the replica railway ticket office in the foyer, exact in every 1940s detail, even down to the stationmaster’s hat, the tape inside its rim worn oily smooth from many youthful foreheads. I must have tried it on a hundred times when I was small enough for it to slip and cover my eyes so that, in darkness, I could breathe the dusty smell of it, of soot and sweat and Brasso.

  Besides, it’s not far to Saxmundham on the bus. Before Joan retired we used to ride in together in the mornings, me to the museum and her to Knit Knacks. We used to get the back seat if we could manage it, to give her needle room. That’s what she called it when I was a kid, if I leaned too close to her on the sofa: ‘Sit up and let me have some needle room’. Back then she was always knitting something, even on the bus: wool was a vocation. At home we both have bedrooms full of vivid, multihued creations, hand-knitted before Joan’s hands began to disregard the signals from her brain.
Too numerous to wear, they remind me of Charles Randolph Badderley’s victims: bright jays and hummingbirds and lorikeets, kingfishers and resplendent birds of paradise, piled high in cupboards and squashed into drawers.

  Now, as often as not, I have the back seat to myself. Coming home I catch the 5.04, or the 5.44 if I’m picking up groceries from the list Joan gives me, for her to make our tea. She was a good cook as well as a knitter, was Joan. Her raised pork pie was famed at summer fetes and harvest teas. Lately, though, I do most of the work under her instruction. It’s not so much the shaking – not since Dr Stebbings got her tablets right – as that her fingers lack the force. She hasn’t the strength to grip, she says, whether it’s knitting needles or the vegetable knife. So I peel and chop and grate and stir while she tells me what to do.

  Sometimes even that is hard, these days. It was names that her brain began to scramble first, of people and of places, and then the ordinary names of things. ‘Wash the trellis,’ she’ll say, when she means the lettuce, or, ‘Shell the beef. The peef. The peas.’

  Then the other important words began to slither from her grasp, the adjectives and verbs. ‘Slice the tomatoes,’ she’ll tell me, ‘and make them nice and skin. Nice and skid. Thid... Not thick – the other thing.’