Other Earths

“We’ll be the judges of that, won’t we, Wally?” Ralph said to me, as if we’d been working together for years.

I closed the door behind us.

The man stiffened in his chair and peered at the door with squinty eyes. “Ralph? Good lord, it can’t be, can it?”

“George?”

“One and the same, old boy!”

Ralph shook his head in delighted astonishment. “Of all the places!”

A smile spread across the other man’s face. “I presume you found out I was working here?”

“Not at all!”

The man laughed. “But it was you that put the word in for me!”

He had quite a posh way of speaking, like Ralph, but there was a bit of Yorkshire in there as well.

I placed my stretcher against the wall, coming to the conclusion I wouldn’t be needing it, even though the man would still need to come back to Cranbrook.

“Well, yes,” Ralph said. “But that was a while ago, wasn’t it? You’ll have to make allowances for me, I’m afraid—getting a bit doddery in my old age.” He put down his own stretcher and shook his head again, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Slowly he moved to examine the seated man. “Well, what happened? Did you get knocked down in here?”

“No,” our patient said. “I was outside, coming down the ladder from the pickup tube, when some shells hit the dish. Got knocked off the ladder by a couple of splinters. Dashed my head on the side of the hut and grazed my arm.”

Ralph gave him a severe look. “You were outside during a shelling? You silly old fool, Butterworth.”

“The pickup tube needed adjustment. You know how it is—someone had to do it.”

“But not you, George—not you of all people. Well, better get you back to Cranbrook, I suppose. The fellow outside said we can expect flying wings. Don’t expect you’ll be too sorry to miss them, will you?”

“That’s always how it happens,” George said. “Berthas take out our listening posts, then the planes can come in and pick their targets at leisure. You’re right, Ralph, you chaps had best be moving. But you can leave me here— I’ll mend.”

“Not a chance, old man. Can you stand up?”

“Honestly, I’m fine.”

“And we have a duty to look after you, so there’s no point in arguing—right, Wally?”

“Right, sir,” I said.

Ralph offered him a hand, and the seated man moved to stand up. Seeing that he didn’t like having to put weight on his forearm, I wondered if his injury was a bit more serious than just a graze.

Just at that moment there was a distant whump that made itself felt more through the ground than the air. It was followed in quick succession by another, a little closer and sharper sounding. Accompanying the sound of the bombs was a mournful droning sound.

“That’s your flying wings,” George said, standing on his own two feet. “They were quick about it this time—give ’em credit. Probably got U-boats watching the station from the sea.”

I heard the boom of our own antiaircraft guns—you can’t mistake a seventy-five millimeter cannon for anything else, once you’ve worked on them. But something told me they were just taking potshots, lobbing shells into the sky in the vain hope of hitting one of those droning, batlike horrors.

“Righty-ho,” said Ralph. “Let’s get you to the ambulance, shall we?”

I moved to the door and opened it again, just enough to admit a sliver of overcast daylight. At that moment another bomb fell, much closer this time. It was only twenty or thirty yards from the barbed wire on the other side of the road, and the blast launched a fan of sand and soil and rubble into the air. I felt as if someone had whacked a cricket bat against the side of my head—for a moment my good ear went pop, and I couldn’t hear anything at all. Suddenly the distance to the ambulance looked immense. My hearing came back in a muffled way, but even so the siren managed to sound more insistent than before, as if it were telling us: Now you’ll believe me, won’t you?

I closed the door hard and looked back at the other two. “I think it’s a bit risky, sir. They seem to be concentrating the attack around here.”

“We’d best sit tight and hope it passes,” George said. “We’ll be safe enough in here—the hut’s a lot sturdier than it looks.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Ralph said, sitting down in the other chair. Then he looked at me. “I don’t suppose you have the faintest idea what’s going on, Wally?”

“Not really, sir. I mean, I gather you two know each other, but beyond that …”

Ralph said, “George and I go back a long way, although we haven’t clapped eyes on each other in—what? Ten years, easily.”

“I should say,” George said.

“This is Wally Jenkins, by the way. He’s a good sort, although I don’t think he much cares for my driving.” Ralph leaned toward me with a knowing look in his eye, as if he were about to offer me a sweet. “George and I were both interested in music before the war. Very interested, I suppose you might say.”

“I heard you were a composer, sir,” I said.

“As was George here. Great things were expected of Butterworth.”

I racked my brains, but I didn’t think I’d ever heard of anyone called George Butterworth. But, then again, I’d never heard of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and I’d heard from the men at Cranbrook that he really was something, that people used to go to concerts of his music before the war.

“Actually,” Ralph went on, “there were three of us back then—George, me, and dear old Gustav.”

“Isn’t that a German name, sir?”

“Gussie was as English as you or I,” George said sternly.

“You did hear what they did to him, didn’t you?” asked Ralph. “Locked away by the Patriotic League for having latent Germanic sympathies. They say he hung himself, but I’ve never been sure about that.”

“It was just a name, for heaven’s sake. He’d stopped calling himself Von Holst. Wasn’t that enough for them?”

“Nothing was ever good enough,” Ralph said.

A brooding silence fell across the room, interrupted only by the occasional muffled explosion from somewhere outside. Ralph turned to me again and said, “George and I were both members of the Folk Music Society. Now, I don’t imagine that means very much to you now. But back then—this is thirty years ago, remember—George and I took to traveling around the country recording songs. We were quite the double act. We had an Edison Bell disc phonograph, one of the very few in the country at the time. A brute of a machine, but at least it provided a talking point, a way of breaking the ice.” He nodded at the equipment on the shelves. “Of course, it meant that we had some basic familiarity with recording apparatus—microphones, cables, that kind of thing.” He paused, and for the first time I saw something close to pain in his otherwise boyish face. “In twenty-three I was shellshocked while on ambulance duties in the Salient. I was no good for battlefield work after that, so I was transferred here, to Dungeness. I was one of the operators, listening to the sounds picked up by these dishes, straining to hear the first faint rumble of an incoming airplane. In the end, I was no good for it, and I had to go back to ambulance work; but I got to know some of the names in charge, and when I heard that dear old Butterworth had been shot …”

“I was wounded by a sniper,” George said. “Not the first time, either—took one in the Somme in sixteen. That second was my ticket out of the war, though. But do you know the funny thing? I didn’t want it. What was I going to do—go back to music, with all this still going on?” He shook his head, as if the very idea was as ludicrous as staging a regatta in the English Channel.

“I know how you felt,” said Ralph. “I had so many things unfinished when this all began and so many more things I wanted to do. Lark Ascending—that needed more work. That opera I keep talking about—I feel as if Falstaff’s been standing at my shoulder for twenty years, urging me to get Sir John down on paper. And another symphony …I’ve had the skeleton of the Pastoral in my head ever since I was in the Somme, all those years ago.”

“The bugle player,” George said, nodding—he must have heard the story several times.

“They still won’t understand it—they’ll think it’s all lambkins frolicking in meadows.”