For a moment we were stuck like that, a little boy and a big girl, holding the living heart of a V-1 flying bomb between us.
The silver cylinder had a type number stamped on the cap, and a manufacturer’s name: RHEINMETALL
Incredible to think that someone else’s fingers had fitted this destructive thing together, inserted the fragile switches and connected the wires and screwed on the cap, and now it was balanced ready to blow my own fingers off. Or this boy’s.
I took it from him very carefully.
‘Now scoot,’ I said sadly, because I really thought I was as good as dead.
As he handed it over, the wires simply fell free. They probably had been disconnected the whole time. At least if the fuse went off it wasn’t going to take the bomb with it.
‘Get out of here!’ I yelled at the boy.
He hurtled back across the tracks. As for me, my body acted on behalf of my frozen brain. I wound up for a pitch and hurled the fuse away from the bomb, away from the railway, into the scrubby thin woodland along the tracks.
It hit a beech sapling with a small crack and bang. Bits of bark exploded around the tree, and the trunk sagged – it bent right in half as though it had been caught in a tornado. It wasn’t a very big explosion. But we all saw it. Maddie crouched next to the wreckage of the bomb with her arms over her head, like she’d done in the bus.
I said to her, ‘Come on, Maddie – get away.’
I tugged her across the tracks and over the stone wall. Wouldn’t you know it, I tore my skirt going back over the wall when everything was safe again and not when I was racing to save a kid from blowing himself up! And unbelievably – or very believably, I guess, as my ten years’ experience of being a big sister to those hooligan twins Karl and Kurt ought to have taught me by now – the three boys were still standing there rooted to the spot, staring at the destruction with wide, excited eyes.
‘Would that have gone off in my hand, miss?’
‘How do I know? Maybe! Come on, you’ve got to let the authorities know what you’ve found. Come down to the airfield with us and make a proper report. Get going!’
Maddie pulled herself together and began to herd the boys along the road. ‘Go go go!’
The kids let themselves be bullied now, eyeing me respectfully. ‘You don’t throw like a girl,’ one of them commented.
‘That’s ’cause I played softball at school. Like baseball. Or cricket, sort of – none of us “throw like girls”.’
‘You a Yank?’ asked the boy who’d extracted the fuse, pointing to the ‘USA’ flash on my sleeve.
‘Obviously.’
‘You proud of it?’
Smart aleck.
I had to think about the answer to this question.
‘Yes,’ I said after a moment. ‘Yeah, I am.’
‘That bomb’s dead now, right, miss? A dead doodlebug –’ They all snickered. ‘That’s what the UXB teams do, they take out the fuse –’
I hesitated. I don’t know a lot about bombs. Maddie said, ‘Listen, that dead doodlebug’s still full of TNT, and if that fuse had gone off inside the aircraft, it would have blown you up and probably the rest of us too. What were you doing, playing UXB team?’
‘We saw it come down!’ one of them explained eagerly, and they all broke into grins. ‘We heard it and came running up to the station bridge to watch – Rob had his dad’s field glasses –’
(Crazy kids.)
‘– And we realised it was heading straight for us and we lay right down on the road next to the wall till the noise stopped, because we thought we were dead for sure!’
They were all still completely white around the gills, but they were enjoying themselves more than anything else. Ten-year-old boys are crazy.
We escorted them to the airfield and called out the local Air Raid Precautions warden. He was really nice to the kids, and took them along with him to watch from a safe distance as the road and railway were closed off in preparation for the UXB squad to come along and work their magic.
‘Does your Uncle Roger ever have to deal with unexploded bombs?’ Maddie asked as we watched them go. ‘Isn’t he in the Royal Engineers too, like the bomb squads?’
I never thought about it. I just assumed that all he did was build bridges and dig trenches. Or tell people to do it anyway. I think of Uncle Roger as having a ‘safe’ job.
I got back to the airfield at Hamble in time to pick up the last delivery chit for that evening, a new Spitfire to be delivered to Chattis Hill for testing. It’s only a twenty-minute flight there, but it took me a couple of hours to get back – no more trains and, of course, since I was the last flight of the day, there weren’t any other ferry pilots heading home for me to tag along with. By 10 p.m. the best offer I’d had was from a canteen dishwasher who said I could borrow her bicycle if I brought it back before lunchtime the next day, and I had to bribe her with today’s chocolate ration (you get a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate with every completed ferry flight). I’d already handed it over when a fireman who was going off duty took pity on me and offered me a lift on his motorcycle.
By the time I got home I was absolutely whacked. It was 11 o’clock and I was hungry enough to wolf down one of Mrs Hatch’s awful spam stews (she assures me the veg in it is cabbage and not nettle). Late as it was, she’d very kindly reheated it for me. I fell into bed and thought briefly of Maddie and Jamie, newlyweds too tired to make love; and then I fell asleep too.
I dreamed about the Rheinmetall fuse. I dreamed it detonated in the boy’s hands and blew his fingers off.
It was so vivid – like seeing a moving picture shot in close up. All I could see was the boy’s hands, palms spread, with the silver cylinder lying across them, smooth, round fingertips sticking out just beneath the shining metal, then all of it flying apart. I woke up gasping.
I am spooked by the image. I can’t get it out of my head. I was hoping I could forget it by writing about the wedding – I started out to do a poem, didn’t I? And all I’ve done is write about buzz bombs. I just learned that the TNT mix they use in them is called Amatol. It is a good word, if a bad thing. Perhaps I should try writing poetry about bombs.
Silver tube of fuse and hollow
Cylinder of detonator
Cap and gyro
Blah. It would be good if my heart was in it – like Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’. But I don’t want to think about it. Small smooth fingers blown to bloody bone.