Chapter 2
Back at home Vicky, Tom’s mum, is laying out the tea things.
“Mum, we saw a pilot on the old airfield. From the War. Dorothy says it was a ghost.”
“There aren’t any ghosts here, Dorothy shouldn’t joke about these things. It was probably someone walking his dog.”
“No, she said it was the local ghost. He didn’t have a dog.” Tom looks down at Nelson, in his usual teatime place under the kitchen table. “He was in uniform, but it had black marks on it. I think he had been burned. He was sad. I think he was hoping to meet someone. Were there pilots here in the War?”
“Yes, the field was used as an airbase.”
“With a proper runway and everything?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I think it was just a grass strip. We can look it up if you like, there’ll be stuff on the internet.” She opens her laptop while Tom eats his tea.
“It was first used in the First World War. The pill boxes were built later, to protect it in case the Germans invaded. And it says it was used for air displays.”
“Wow,” says Tom. “That would be cool. We saw the Spitfire again today too, but I couldn’t really see it. The corn is too high.”
“The cobs are starting to ripen. They’ll be cutting it soon I expect.”
Tom finishes his tea, picks up a toy plane that is sitting on a shelf and arcs it through the air, spinning round.
“If you are going to play with that you’d better take it outside,” says Vicky, “you’ll knock something over;” and Tom runs out through the kitchen door into the garden, the plane swooping behind him.
Tom is a pilot, and for a few minutes he runs around the garden making circles and loops with the plane. He is a fighter pilot, chasing enemy planes, turning and spinning to avoid their bullets, shooting them down. And then he is the star of an air show, practising barrel rolls and loops, showing off to the crowd. But it is hot and after a while he collapses on his back into the cool grass. He shuts his eyes, and in his mind he sees planes flying over. Perhaps German planes, on their way to drop bombs on London. He can see small fighter planes chasing after them, dog fights, with Spitfire pilots shooting down enemy Messerschmitts. He can hear them firing their guns at each other, can smell the fuel and the smoke. There is one plane he can see clearly, the same rough Spitfire engine sound he heard in the field before but louder and closer, following a German plane that is dodging through some light cloud trying to get away. The two planes are fixed together in a close fight. One moment one is behind the other looking for a kill shot and then suddenly is too high as the plane in front dives and twists. The fight goes on, he hears short bursts of machine guns firing. Suddenly the Spitfire is just above him, much closer, lower in the sky, heading towards him. It is dropping and it turns slightly away heading for the old runway. It is an emergency landing, smoke is coming out of one engine. He jumps to his feet. It is hot in the sun, and he stands up too fast. The noise fades as Tom watches, his vision is fractured, as if looking through crazed glass. The blood in his head is buzzing in his ears. The plane gets bigger, and lower, much lower suddenly. He can feel it fly over just above the nearby treetops, filling his vision. Grey and glinting in the sunshine. It is going to crash.
And then he can’t see it, it has dropped below a slight rise in the ground. He hears the crash, sees flames, a shimmer of smoke in the sky where it must have come down. He realises he is is on his knees, and he stays there while gradually his sight clears, and his hearing comes back, garden sounds.
“Dad, dad.” Tom rushes inside. “Dad, the plane has crashed. Dad, in the cornfield. We must go and look.”
Martin looks up. “What plane?”
“The Spitfire.”
And seeing the fear and certainty in his son’s face Martin pulls on his shoes. “Let’s go and see. Come on Nelson.”
He grabs the dog’s lead and they walk back up to the airfield and head across on the footpath.
“Where did you see it?”
“I was in the garden. It was heading for us over the field.”
They walk across to the other side of the field, and back towards the church. There’s a faint haze of smoke lying across the field, and a smell of burning, perhaps from a nearby barbecue. But no sign of a crashed pane. The dog chases off after something, but it is only a rabbit.
“It was there, I saw it, I heard it.” But as he speaks the memory seems to blur, as if he is struggling to recall it, and Tom knows there is nothing there. He runs along the footpath but can’t see through the corn. Frantic now with disappointment, tears are in his eyes, and he rubs them with the back of his hand.
“Tom, stop.” Martin catches him up, holds him and looks into his face. “There’s nothing there. No crash. Sometimes our brains see things that aren’t real. You dozed off in the heat, and perhaps dreamed it. We’ll go back home.”
“It was there. I saw it.”