The past comes in bits and pieces from
Granny. My family doesn't
linger too long on the past, and the continual march forward takes up most of our time. Once in a while, when I sat in her
immaculate basement apartment with its
deep blue couch and
Queen Anne legs, after watching
Wheel of Fortune and then
Jeopardy!, puzzling out the canned puzzles of the day with her, she would drop into a tale from the past.
Concrete, filled with pure memory and
shorthand references we both knew. "You know how he was, the hothead." Her soft
Scotch accent peppered the conversations, adding an air of
wispy recollection and accenting the smile of a
master storyteller. She
spoils me to this day, and I know she loves to tell her tales to her "
Wee Jimmy", a childhood term of endearment. They are not always
nice stories, but they never change. They are the tales of her
life.
Here is the
Spitfire story as I have heard it many times before:
During the
war, my
gran had just become a teenager. Living on her family's
modest farm in
Ayrshire,
Scotland, she helped her mother raise her 12 siblings while her father toiled in fields of
barley and raised racing
greyhounds for the local track. He grew quite famous for his hounds. Since the
war started, he worked growing
hemp for
ropes, as dictated by the local
Materials board. His older
sons joined the
Army and went off to
war. Gran says he looked extra
ragged when his boys left. Sad on a
deep fatherly level. The farm was far enough from the
next town to keep them relatively out of the action. The exception was the local
airstrip, a small quickly produced afterthought of a place that held the pride of the
RAF for quick action against
German bombers. The
Battle of Britain raged in the south of
England, and children at school told tales from the
radio. Her father wouldn't let them
read the
newspaper after her
brothers left. The farm stood in the
shadow of the
Luftwaffe's favorite path to
Glasgow and the airfield bristled with
AAA and
fighters to drive them off.
During the
Glasgow blitz, she didn't have to go to school for a few weeks, and they spent time inside with
blackout drapes pulled tight on the windows. No bombs fell near her farm but a
warehouse in town was
blasted flat in an
ammunition shipment accident. Her friends buzzed with news when she went to town for
rations. She said that she heard them
once, when she slipped out to the barn to check on the
plowhorses on a clear night. They droned like distant
bees, and a tinny
pop pop came from the far off
airfield. They didn't use many
searchlights outside of the cities.
Her
worst memory of the war came during this time out of school. She was growing
restless and her mother suggested that she take her father's
lunch out to the
barn for him. She was carrying a
mug of tea and a meager plate of
toast and baked beans out the back path to the barn when her father came running out to meet her,
panicked. He was
swearing for her to
drop the
plate and run when he scooped her up in his arms as he
ran past. It was only then that she heard the
thundering roar of the
aircraft engines just across the field. A smoking
Spitfire blistered across the
top of the
barn and cleared the house by
feet. Her father fell
bodily on top of her and she cried when her
wrist broke. As fast as the plane had come, it had gone. The pilot had just teased the smoking plane up from its
terminal dive when he crossed the path of another green painted
fighter. They smashed together like paper and
dropped heavily from the
sky, falling in the far field of
hemp across the gravel road. They landed between her father's field and the back of the neighbor's
sheep pasture. The burning
heap exploded and roiled with
black smoke. Everything after that happened in a rush of memory. Father took her in the house and rushed out to the
wreck.
Firefighters came from town. The doctor came and wrapped her
wrist. Men from the
RAF came and talked with Father and the neighbors. The big green trucks hauled the twisted burnt
frames away. The pilots came away in
white sheets. The
hemp grew in the rutted ruined field. Father
kissed her and apologized for yelling. "Didn't want to lose my
wee Nell" he said.
Seems that two
young pilots,
sleep deprived from the night before, had been sent up to chase the
Nazi bombers returning early in the morning from their
deadly work in the city. They chased them and one pilot had caught some
flak in his engine or had a
major mechanical failure. The pair was limping back to the nearby
airfield when the plane started to fail. His wingman had followed his
descent and crossed into his path as he pulled out of his brutal
dive towards the farm. They
tangled up and had no chance to parachute being so close to the ground. They buried them in the
town cemetery with a full ceremony. My gran never went out in that particular field
again.