Page 5 of The Dark of the Moon
For a moment, I think she’s going to cry. I worry I’ve overstepped the mark. But she regains her composure, her expression determined, holding it together, and I guess that must be something she’s learned to do out of all-too-frequent necessity. ‘Of course. We worry constantly about how he’ll cope with things like work and relationships, navigating life ... And what happens when we’re not here. But most of the time we’re just trying to get through each day as best we can, dealing with the curveballs that seem to come out of nowhere whenever something affects him. It’s relentless.’ Her gaze travels to the trampoline in the garden. ‘A bit like being on that and never, ever being able to get off.’
I realise Kendra and Dan are as trapped by autism as Finn is. Imprisoned by the fear and the endless second-guessing, the walking on eggshells as they try to navigate their way through the minefield of emotions, the constant questions, the fragility of his brilliant but intricate mind. I see the tears well up in those sea-green eyes of hers, but she blinks them away once more, then readjuststhe already perfectly aligned pen, grasping at some semblance of agency and order in a world where such things are scarce.
She’s giving her life to help her son. So I reckon giving her my story is the least I can do.
‘Are you ready to continue?’ I ask, and she smiles and nods, reaching for her pen and notebook. ‘Remind me where we got to last time,’ I say.
She scans her notes. ‘You’d just finished your ATA training ...’
‘Ah yes.’ I settle into the chair, easing the perpetual ache in my muscles as I stretch out my good leg, and pick up where we left off.
I’ll never forget the morning I walked into the mess hall at White Waltham, reporting for my first proper stint. My new uniform felt scratchy and uncomfortable, but I felt so very proud to be wearing it at last. It was a foggy day, so flights were grounded, and the canteen was full of the hissing of the tea urn and the chatter of the pilots, who were lounging around waiting for the cloud to clear. I was attempting to conceal my nerves and appear relaxed and confident as I met my new colleagues, but then my jaw dropped at the sight of none other than my heroine, Amy ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, sitting there drinking tea alongside a couple of the other girls. She was still the epitome of glamour. By the time she’d joined the ATA she was divorced, had become a journalist and had modelled for the Schiaparelli fashion house, lending her an even greater aura of sophistication. Seeing me standing there, goggle-eyed and awkward on my first day as a new recruit, she got to her feet to say hello, pulling up a chair for me at the table.
‘You’re Philly Buchanan, aren’t you? I met your brother, Teddy, at the Astor Club in London the other day. Small world. It turnsout he and your other brother were at school in Edinburgh with my ex-husband. He told me to look out for you.’
I was utterly astounded that my idol knew my name! You’d have thought someone so famous would have been a bit standoffish, but Amy was the opposite. She was natural, warm, and down-to-earth. I’ve never forgotten her kindness, nor how she and the other girls welcomed me and made me feel an equal. Even though I was a lowly Third Officer, they readily accepted me on the basis that we were all ferry pilots together and would be facing the same duties and dangers.
We were a motley crew. As with most of the trainers at Luton, the men were pilots who were deemed either too old or too unfit to fly in combat. There was a long-standing joke elsewhere in the RAF that the letters ATA stood for ‘Ancient and Tattered Airmen’ and now that other substandard category was included too: women. The press loved us. They called us the ‘Attagirls’ and published photographs of the more glamorous among us in the papers. Especially Amy, of course. Volunteers had joined up from across the world, so I rubbed shoulders in the mess with pilots from Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands. One of the girls was from Poland and we used to exchange a few words in her native language. I hadn’t had much opportunity to use my Polish in Scotland, of course, but a few phrases soon came back to me.
‘Dzis jest ladna pogoda,’ I’d say to Agnieszka. The weather is nice today. By British standards, it probably was.
And she’d laugh and reply, ‘Nie, pogoda jak zwykle okropna.’ No, the weather is awful, as usual.
When I asked her about her homeland, her expression would grow serious, and I could see the sadness in her eyes. Like so many of her fellow Poles, she’d fled when the Nazis invaded her country, coming to England to join the fight under General Sikorski’s government-in-exile. Her parents hadn’t managed to get out,though, and she was desperately worried for them and the other members of her extended family who’d been left behind. So I’d try to distract her by asking her to speak Polish to me, and was surprised by how much I understood, even if it was a struggle to think up the words with which to reply from the depths of my childhood memories. With practice, though, I began to get a little more fluent.
We all had plenty of time to get to know one another. Because we were so often constrained by the weather, much of our time was spent sitting around in the mess hall waiting to be given clearance to fly. We’d play cards or backgammon, and I enjoyed doing the crossword in the newspaper – the cryptic one – and found I could often solve the final clues that the others couldn’t get. That first winter, I chiefly remember the cold and the damp in my digs and having a perpetually dripping nose. But the mess hall was warm with camaraderie, and I made some really good friends.
I was the baby of the group. Amy, being so much older and more experienced than I in every way, took me under her wing from the outset – keeping her promise to Teddy to look out for me, I suppose. Before each sortie, if she was around, she’d always check which type of aircraft I’d been assigned and make sure I’d gone through my handling notes. She knew as much about the particular quirks of each model as any of the flight engineers. They all loved her, of course, even the grumpiest of the ground crew, and had huge respect for her because of all her experience.
After a while, as we worked together and spent many an hour sitting in the mess hall waiting for the weather to clear, Amy became a good friend and I could laugh with her about how starry-eyed I’d been when I met her on that very first day. One afternoon, when I arrived back to the base after delivering a plane to Tangmere, an airfield on the south coast, she announced a group of the girls were going up to town (as we called London) that evening and askedme to join them. ‘We’ll go to the club, see who’s around. Come with us, Philly. It’ll do us all good to have a change of scene.’ It was springtime and the Blitz hadn’t yet begun (little did we know what the Luftwaffe would prove capable of when they unleashed their bombers on the city in the autumn of that year), so popping up to town for the evening was easily done. It felt strange to do my hair and put on a frock for once. I’d grown so used to wearing my air force blue trousers and jacket and pulling on a flying helmet that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to get dressed up. We crowded into a train carriage for the hour’s journey into London. Amy pulled out a tube of scarlet lipstick from her bag and applied it, using the window as a mirror. She saw me watching and handed it to me. ‘Here, put on a bit of this,’ she said. ‘I find it helps no end in distracting attention from my red and runny nose.’ I followed suit and when I went to hand it back to her, she waved it away, saying ‘Keep it. The colour really suits you.’
The whole lot of us walked arm-in-arm from the station through the blacked-out streets, laughing and chattering, excited to be out on the town for once. We attracted a few turned heads and wolf whistles along the way, too. I felt a bit overwhelmed when we walked into the club, it was so crowded, so hot, so bright. It felt as if the room fell silent for a moment at the sight of Amy Johnson walking in. She had that effect wherever she went. I remembered the newspaper reports of a million people lining the streets of London to cheer her home on her return from her record-breaking flight to Australia. Her beauty and her charisma made her what would nowadays be termed a celebrity, I suppose, but all the attention never went to her head. She just wanted to get on with her job and fly planes.
I was still so young and gauche – just nineteen – and not nearly as worldly as most of the others. But after we found a table and a round of drinks appeared, I began to relax and enjoy myself.Amy knew everyone, it seemed, and we were soon surrounded by a noisy group of young men, resplendent in their RAF uniforms. More drinks appeared, as if by magic, and the band struck up a dance tune. Several of the girls were whisked off to the dance floor. And then a pilot slipped into the newly vacated chair next to me and I found myself looking into a pair of smiling blue eyes. ‘Fancy meeting you here, Philly Buchanan,’ he said.
‘Ben!’ I’m sure my cheeks must have blushed crimson all over again. I’d thought about my handsome instructor often since saying goodbye to him at the end of my training, and whenever I saw a Spitfire when delivering planes to airfields the length and breadth of the country, I couldn’t help but check to see whether he might be piloting it.
We talked for hours. He asked about my work and told me what he could about his, although naturally he was bound by secrecy not to divulge any specifics. We all knew from the posters at airfields thatCareless Talk Costs Lives. I gathered he’d been assigned to a squadron that was preparing to see action over Europe.
And when we weren’t talking, we danced. He was as good a dancer as he was a pilot. The only dances I’d been to before then were awkward Scottish reel evenings, yet with him my feet scarcely touched the ground as he guided me around the floor. I was floating on air.
When it was time to leave to catch the last train back to White Waltham, he walked me to the station. He said goodbye, but he didn’t walk away, as if he were as reluctant to part as I. Perhaps it was the headiness of falling in love – although it might just have been the gin I’d drunk – but on the spur of the moment I stood on tiptoes and kissed him. And he kissed me back. I wanted that moment to last forever. But then the guard was blowing his whistle, bringing me back down to earth with a bump, and one of the others grabbed my arm and pulled me into the carriage. The doorslammed shut behind me and the train began to move. When I looked back, pressing my nose against the window, he was still standing there. And there he stayed, watching the train pull away, until I couldn’t see him anymore.
The other girls teased me mercilessly on the journey home. ‘Be careful, Philly,’ Agnieszka warned. ‘Pilots are nothing but heartbreakers. And he’s a classic example.’
But Amy just smiled and gave me a hug, saying, ‘Pay no attention to them, Philly. They’re just jealous that you hooked one of the best-looking pilots. Besides, even if he does turn out to be a dud, we all need to have our hearts broken a few times in life. You might as well start with a good-looking one.’ Then she added, ‘I told you that red lipstick works like a charm!’
I’ve worn that colour ever since. Because Amy gave it to me. And it reminds me of that first kiss, and the night I knew that Ben had fallen in love with me, just as I had with him.
Finn
Today Mum decided we should take the Old Lady out to see the sights on the island. I think she was using it as an excuse to make me go outside too because she didn’t swallow it when I said I needed to stay at home and read the sailing book again.
Dad was busy talking to some of the parents on the phone about the arrangements for the camp next week. He says it’s like trying to herd cats getting everything organised. I asked him when he’d been a Cat Herder but he just laughed. It wasn’t a joke, I genuinely wanted to know as I hadn’t realised that might be a job until now. Not that I’m a fan of cats. The only animals I like are the donkeys that graze in the field up the road. They’re usually quiet and placid, and they tend not to do anything sudden or unexpected, unlike cats and dogs. There are some eating the grass in the old earthworks, too, which are the fortifications surrounding the citadel in Saint-Martin, and Mum said that was one of the places we were going to show Mrs Philly Delaney. So I went upstairs to put on my trainers and get my ear defenders because I like going to the citadel. It’s really a high-security prison but everyone pretends it’s just a marvellous historical fortress, because they don’t like the idea of people who’ve done such bad crimes having to serve a life sentence in the middle of a tourist spot. I find it quite interesting. There’s also Fort Boyard, which is out in the sea, and it was used asa military prison once. But then it was abandoned and only used for a game show on the telly. If the weather’s OK, Dad is planning to end the sailing camp with an outing to go and see it. He says it will be the Highlight of the Week.
We drove to Saint-Martin and Mum parked the car, then we walked along the embankment to the citadel. The Old Lady uses a walking stick, which is covered in flowers. It can be collapsed down and carried in her bag too, which is pretty handy.
Apart from the donkeys grazing in the old fortifications, the other reason I like the citadel is I can collect more names. In the olden days, it was used as a place to keep prisoners before they were shipped off to the penal colonies in places like French Guiana, which is in South America, or New Caledonia, which is in the Pacific Ocean. The prisoners must have been made to work on the fortifications or to wait for ages beside the walls for the boats to come and take them away, because the stones have hundreds of names carved into them. I like doing rubbings of the carved names with a pencil and a piece of paper. I do rubbings of headstones in cemeteries too. I’m making a collection. I laminate them and put them in a big folder. My favourite ones so far from the citadel are G.T.Giraud1874 andGrand1871 andJoyeo Josephbecause they were very good carvings, and the rubbings came out really well. It’s nice when they have a date. There are some more recent ones too.
