A big old plane tree sits at the far edge of the garden, in front of the house. Beyond it the hillside drops out of sight into the blues and greys of the Cromarty Firth. My visitor is sitting on the ground under the tree, looking out to sea. Her arms are wrapped around her knees, and she is wearing the same clothes I once saw her in: frayed fatigue pants, and a skimpy khaki vest that clings to her body. The other thing she is wearing is that smile that’s maybe a smile, and maybe not. She doesn’t appear to feel the cold. I suppose that means that she’s gone, at last. It won’t be long before we’re all gone.
I don’t care as much about that as I used to.
Springtime in Germany: a recipe, and a little history
Charlie Bassett’s journey through northern Europe in 1945 has been a much more personal trip than any of those I flew with him from Bourn Airfield in Tuesday’s Child in 1944 – I knew some of the men who actually did it, you see. There actually was a car named Kate, and they took her to Germany.
The airfield at Tempsford, which was the trigger of his headlong rush across the Low Countries, was once referred to by Winston Churchill as the most secret place in England. He was sandbagging, of course; there were far more secret locations than that – perhaps Tempsford was just the most secret place he felt he could trust us with. The function of the two squadrons that used it was flying personnel and supplies to agents and Resistance fighters operating in Axis-held territories. The aircraft they used were frequently unarmed, and the work was dangerous. It is to the RAF’s great credit that it made room there for a few pilots whose personal beliefs conflicted with killing other human beings, but who still wanted to serve. Tempsford still has its pub, but another two that the aircrews used are now private houses, and the Hall is a corporate HQ. The village’s best-kept secret is the small medieval manor farmhouse on the south side of its main street – it looks as if it hasn’t changed in five hundred years. Everton village, just east of the airfield, has the Thornton Arms, the pub that Charlie knew; it still serves one of the best pints of bitter in England. A time traveller can lunch there, then walk almost from its front door, down the wooded footpath, to the skeleton of the airfield. There you will find sections of runway and perimeter track, a parachute store camouflaged as a barn, and a clump of trees, each planted and labelled in memory of an agent, or an aircrew, who didn’t return. Waterloo Farm still endures, and the farm cottage at which Charlie was billeted can be seen from the track that spears past it.
Charlie set off for France from Croydon Aerodrome, which was the original London Airport – and a far more civilized terminal than the municipal toilet we built at Heathrow to replace it. Before the war one could see over the airport perimeter from the top deck of a passing bus . . . and that’s how my mother and father saw a new squadron of Spitfires arrive in August 1939, and realized that another world war was imminent. The old man joined up a couple of weeks later. The prewar airport terminal has been sensitively conserved, and converted for commercial use. The visiting public are welcomed, and there is usually a display of artefacts and memorabilia demonstrating its history. A society has been formed to preserve and promote its heritage.
Sadly, the last time I looked you could no longer get a pint at the Propeller. The watering place of choice for many of the defenders of London in 1940 is boarded up and falling to pieces. Shame on the owners and the council; that should never be allowed to happen to a decent pub.
Charlie recalls the old prewar Imperial Airways biplane airliners that dominated the air route between Croydon and the Continent. Like most large aircraft in private hands, they were pressed into RAF service in 1939. One, named Scylla, ended up at Drem Airfield in East Lothian, Scotland – just twenty minutes’ drive from where I write this. It was blown over and wrecked by one of our northern storms in 1940, and the fuselage, with its galley and first-class seats, turned into a dispersal hut for the pilots of 605 Squadron who were defending Edinburgh. They cut a glade into the woods close to their Spitfires, and hoisted it up on bricks. Who knows, perhaps a schoolboy poking through the thickets and woods around the old airfield will yet come upon its mouldering frame.
It is wrong to think of the newly liberated countries of Europe as pacified in early 1945. There were old scores to settle, and political tensions, centred on organized armed groups with incompatible ambitions, created deep fault-lines in societies – there were more guns per head of population in France in January 1945 than there are in Florida today. Young men from Resistance groups, who had grown up with no trade except fighting and sabotage, grappled with a similar problem to today’s retired Provo or UDA fighter –What do I do next? The liberation of the Channel countries called into being a window of opportunity for the opportunists, and criminal opportunities for the criminals . . . and armies of displaced people were beginning to move around Europe like a legion of the lost. By 1948 there were few adults in the UK who didn’t know what the acronym DP stood for. It is not in current use, even though mass movements of the dispossessed have occurred throughout Europe, Africa and Asia ever since. There were also the deserters – from both
