Chapter Fifteen
Iris
In the packed, pulsing heat of Bettys basement bar – the dive, as everyone called it – his hand took a hold of hers, and she turned to him, kissing him through the fear that, from nowhere, assailed her, because he was here, they were both here, and for tonight at least she wouldn’t have to tell him to climb to angels anywhere, or vector anyhow without her.
It was late April. This time the night before, he’d been flying to Essen.
This time tomorrow, who knew what he, or any of them, would be doing.
Maybe the squadron would fly again, maybe they wouldn’t.
Regardless, it wouldn’t be long before they were ordered on another operation, and Iris would take her position in the control room, send them all off with a green for go, and helplessly watch Robbie accelerate away.
When I have enough money and a motorcar, I’ll take you with me everywhere I go, he’d promised her, back when they were children.
But he couldn’t take her to Germany, and Germany was where the squadron always got sent these days.
There’d been no trips to Italy for weeks.
That endless full-mooned night of Iris’s first shift at Doverley, when all of 96 had returned from Milan, felt as though it belonged to several lifetimes ago.
Far too many lifetimes had been ended since.
Most of February had been quiet, with ops frequently scrubbed for bad weather, and she and Robbie had managed to steal much more time together than they’d been forced apart.
But then March had arrived, and with it an inundation of orders from Bomber Command for attack after attack on the Ruhr region and beyond, with streams of up to a thousand planes leaving England some nights, following their designated pathfinders on raids over some of the most heavily defended cities in the Nazi empire: Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin.
In the past six weeks, countless civilians must have been killed – mothers, grandparents, babies – whilst 96 had lost fifteen crews, seven of them flying under the codename V for Verity.
Hamps Heroes, whose operator had been so elated that February night he’d broken radio silence returning from Milan, were long gone, and although Lewis in his tartan slippers was still around, Group Captain Fred Lacey with him, scores of others weren’t.
They were all here too tonight. Iris could sense them everywhere: the ghosts of the present, dancing and drinking alongside the ghosts of the future.
Placing her free hand to Robbie’s face, she leant into him as their lips touched, fighting to quieten the voices of those ghosts in her mind, and focus instead on the here, the now, this moment.
She didn’t want to dwell on whatever new targets the strategists in Bomber Command might be busy identifying.
Or all the lives that had been taken, and would continue to be lost. She didn’t want to think about how, in this moment, fresh recruits were arriving at training camps all over Britain to learn the dark arts of bombing, whilst women in dungarees and headscarves were clocking in for night shifts at factories, rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work soldering together new Lancasters and Halifaxes and Stirlings for more terrified airmen to die in.
She couldn’t think of the sickening waves of fear that kept taking her unawares – like another just had now – filling her with foreboding so strong it felt almost like a warning: bleak, but certain, that this middle she and Robbie had found wasn’t going to last, because their end, that she’d never be ready for, was already waiting for them, not so far away at all.
So, now, here, in this moment, she didn’t think of that.
She kissed Robbie, wrapping him in her arms – laughing as the band struck up ‘A String of Pearls’ and he swung her around – and thought only about how they were in Bettys, together, under the jurisdiction of nobody’s rules but their own, certainly not the adjutant’s, and were celebrating Jacob’s twenty-third birthday, with everyone who was still here safe, and alive, and happy, for one more night at least.
The adjutant, Ambrose, hadn’t come out that night – no one had invited him – but plenty of others had made the journey from Doverley, speeding along the pitch-black country lanes in a convoy of borrowed, gifted, and inherited motors.
Practically every WAAF and airman was there, including Prim (who Iris just could not condition herself into thinking of as Eleanor), and Beth Twinton, and the group captain Fred, who’d brought his wife Miriam, leaving their baby daughter back in Heaton with a sitter.
Lewis was out too, along with the rest of his Bucks Boys, as were all the crew from Mabel’s Fury.
Ames, the flight engineer, was ecstatic because his French fiancée, Mabel, the plane’s namesake, had surprised him a few hours before by turning up at Doverley, fresh off the boat from a spell in France, working for whom she wasn’t at liberty to say, doing what she couldn’t say either, only that it had been très, très productif.
She was staying at the Heaton Arms whilst she was in town, along with all the other wives and fiancées and girlfriends of Doverley’s airmen who snatched whatever opportunity they could to visit.
Plenty of them were at Bettys that night too, drinking and jitterbugging, clinging to their own here and nows.
Keeping her grasp firmly around Robbie’s, Iris went with him, pushing through the teeming throngs for the booth that everyone else was already getting themselves settled in.
They’d only just arrived but she was already perspiring in the bar’s cloying heat.
Glowing, Prim would doubtless correct her.
Iris glanced across at her, well apart from the others and ensconced with her American beau, Clint, at a table for two.
Unlike him, and all the other men present that night, Prim wasn’t in uniform, but done up to the nines in a silk dress.
Neither Iris nor any of the WAAFs from Doverley had worn uniform either – they didn’t have to, they weren’t on duty – and had collectively turned the icy attic pungent with hairspray, perfume and nail polish before they’d left.
‘Ambrose won’t be happy if he finds out about that,’ Prim had remarked, pausing at Iris and Clare’s open door, eyes on the red polish stain spilling across their drawers from the bottle Clare had just knocked over.
‘Tell on me why don’t you?’ Clare had replied, mopping the polish up.
‘I won’t tell,’ Prim had said huffily, flouncing away. ‘I’d never do that.’
‘Only because you’ve got your own secrets to keep,’ said Clare.
Which Prim did.
A favourite of Ambrose’s, she’d never had any of the issues Iris and Clare had encountered securing leave passes from him, but that would doubtless change if he were to get wind of the mischief she was indulging in out of bounds, with an American of all things.
Ambrose held a very dim view of the Americans.
‘As you know I have a low tolerance for tardiness,’ he’d told Beth, ‘and they were inexcusably late to this war.’
Prim wasn’t the kind to be late to anything, and Iris suspected Ambrose wouldn’t be averse to getting up to a bit of mischief with her himself.
Beth agreed. She said he always became very flustered whenever Prim – not a plotter, as Iris had initially guessed, but one of the station’s intelligence officers – delivered her post-interrogation reports to the offices for transmission to HQ.
‘He always offers her tea,’ she said. ‘And biscuits. I fear it might break his skinny little heart if he were to get wind of Clint.’
Prim had met Clint at the end of February, after the USAAF had opened up a new base on the other side of Heaton from Doverley.
He was a clerk rather than an airman, which Prim could get quite prickly about, insisting he’d have got his wings if he could, but was short-sighted, and flat-footed, and colour-blind.
(‘Christ,’ Robbie had remarked soberly when she’d told him all about it, ‘that’s quite a list.’) Iris suspected, actually, that Clint’s lack of wings was part of his appeal for Prim.
Beth had been stationed with her the year before, down in Cambridgeshire, and had told Iris and Clare that she’d lost three beaus there, one after the other.
None of them had been serious, she’d only ever had the chance to go on a couple of dates with them, but after the third had gone down, the other men had decided she was too unlucky to associate with. Like V for Verity.
‘It was pretty awful,’ Beth said. ‘I wouldn’t have wished it on my worst enemy.’
Neither would Iris.
And truly, Prim wasn’t her worst enemy.
She was just … prim.
Clint at least seemed to make her happy. She certainly loved to talk about his family’s acres of land in Colorado, and he kept her well supplied with nylons and chocolate.
Not that she’d offered to share those luxuries with the rest of them. Iris still hadn’t managed to replace the nylons she’d torn on Doverley’s front steps and, like most other women that night, had come out bare-legged. No one wanted to wear woollens to the dive.
‘Do you wish I was an American, Clarence?’ Robbie asked, dipping his head towards her as they passed by Prim and Clint.
‘Every day,’ she said. ‘Every, single, day.’
And he grinned.