& o c? o
Cooper saw w hy Alison Morrissey had brought Baine along. He hardly needed to refer to any notes to deliver the facts of what had happened on 7th January 194 S. The facts as far as they w ere known, anyway.
‘Lancaster SU-V had suffered damage to the outer starboard
o
engine from an attack by a German night-fighter during a bombing raid on Rcrlin,’ he said. ‘The engine had been replaced with a new one, and the crew were on a flight to test the new engine. It was routine they were due to flv from their
C v ^
base at RAF Leadenhall in Nottinghamshire to RAF Renson in Lancashire. It was a distance of no more than a hundred miles. This crew had flown several operations over Germany and had returned safely. Rut something went wrong over Derbyshire.
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SU-V crashed on Irontongue Hill, ten miles from here. There were seven people on board. Five of them died in the impact.’ Cooper found the crew list in front of him. Seven names. Only one of them w as familiar so far — that of the pilot, Daniel McTeague. ‘Hang on a moment,’ he said. ‘Which crew members
O O ‘
were killed?’
‘First of all, the wireless operator, Sergeant Harry Gregory,’ said Raine.
‘Yes.’ Cooper put a small cross next to his name on the list.
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‘The bomb aimer, Rill Mcc, the mid-upper gunner. Alec Hamilton, and the rear gunner, Dick Abbott, who were all British RAF sergeant^.’
‘And one more?’
‘One of the Poles,’ said Raine. ‘The navigator. Pilot Officer Klemens Wach.’
‘Apart From McTcague, that leaves just one who survived,’ said Cooper.
‘Correct.
‘The last one then is the Might engineer. I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it …’
‘It’s Lukasz,’ said Raine. ‘Like^ou/mVi. The other survivor was Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz.’
Grace Lukasy. noticed that Zygmunt showed no interest now in attending Dom Kombatanta, the Polish exservicemen’s club. She was glad about that. These days, the old soldiers and airmen seemed to talk of nothing else but war and death, as if the lives they had lived over nearly six decades since 194-5 had been telescoped into a fortnight’s leave from operational duties. She had heard one former paratrooper who had drunk too much vodka in the club one night saw that he had never
O V
been so alive as when he was facing death. And that’s what they were doing now, too - the old servicemen were standing by to climb on board for their last journey, their final venture into the unknown. This time, their transport would be a hearse.
At one time, Zygmunt and his friends had taken an interest in British politics. They had discussed endlessly what they thought was an amazing apathy on the part of the British themselves, who hardly seemed to want to bother voting, let alone listening to what the politicians had to say.
‘They haven’t been the same since Winston Churchill,’ Zygmunt had said one day.
‘Dad, that was nearly sixty years ago,’ said Peter.
‘That’s what I mean!’ said Zygmunt. ‘It’s been downhill ever since.’
Rut that had been in the days when he would still speak English.
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The old man had a knack of making Grace feel foreign. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which she had never quite got used to since marrying Peter. Before, her name had keen Woodward, and she had never even considered her national identity. She had been British, and that meant you didn’t have to think about it. But suddenly one day, her name was Lukasz, and people treated her differently, as it she had been re-horn as a foreigner. Even people she had known all her life and had been to school with seemed to imagine that she might have forgotten how to speak English.
And then, after the accident six years ago, Grace had found herself heing glad to feel foreign. Now, when she went into a shop and people fell suddenly silent, she was able to believe that it was because they had heard only her name and mentallv
V ^ v
labelled her as some kind of East European asylum seeker. There were plenty of asylum seekers now, in the guest houses in Buxton Road.
Grace had read stories in the newspapers recently about groups of East European women and children visiting shops in local villages supposedly asking (or directions and distracting the shopkeepers while their children stole from the shelves. She had no doubt it was true. Most of these people were gypsies anywav, and Cdendale had suffered its share of gypsy problems for many years. One year, a tribe of them had parked their lorries and caravans in a field next to Queen’s Park. From the corner of the Crescent, she had been able to see their washing lines and their children playing in the hedge bottoms; she had watched their dogs running wild and their rubbish piling up day by day in the corner of the held. It had been like watching the coming of winter and the dying of the landscape, like waiting and waiting lor the first day of spring, when the sun eventually came out and it seemed possible to make things look neat and respectable again. She had experienced the same sense of impotence, the same impatience, as she waited for an irritation to be gone from her life.
But finally, one morning, the gypsies had departed before dawn, leaving a sea of mud in the field and litter of all kinds strewn down the banking towards the road. What did it matter to her where the gypsies went when they moved on? What did
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it matter to her where the snow went.’ 1
