Lost in the Flames by Chris Jory

saw it,’ she said. ‘The bastards are always here.’
    ‘I’ve put my name down for the RAF. I’ll be going for an assessment before too long.’
    ‘But you’re only seventeen. You can’t go yet. They won’t take you’
    ‘I lied.’
    ‘For God’s sake, Jacob, why?’
    ‘The same reason as always – I want to fly. And it’s the right thing to do.’
    ‘You’re a gem, Jacob, you know that? A real gem.’
    And she took his hand again in hers and they walked together up the hill in the warm summer night.
    ***
    The war brought a swelling of the local population and an increase in its variety. The London evacuees had come and gone but the Land Army moved in more permanently, mostly girls from towns further south. Some stayed on the farms, others in the villages and Chipping Norton itself, and a few travelled in on the train, shod in heavy boots suitable for the fields where they helped with the potatoes and the sugar beet. Norman turned the top fields over to crops and took on his quota of help and set them up in Cottages One and Two as these had been vacated when his farmhands went to war.
    War Illustrated brought Jacob news from Kent, where German bombers were targeting the airfields and the skies were filled with vapour trails and soaring, falling, spinning planes and the white fungal blooms of parachutes while the invasion barges were prepared on the coast of the Pas de Calais and the country held its breath. One day in mid-September a German Dornier flew low over the farm, blazing flame from its engines as a Spitfire followed it down until it hit the ground in the fields beyond Over Norton, where Jacob and Norman went later that day to see the wreckage.
    ‘It says here that the Germans have lost more planes over Kent than they can bear,’ said Jacob the next day, looking up from what he was reading. ‘They can’t invade us now, without control of the air.’
    Alongside the falling German planes had come a steady harvest of German airmen, floating down into the orchards of Kent, frightening livestock and old ladies with the dull clump of their flying boots hitting the ground, to be gathered up by eager volunteers with Home Guard armbands and farmhands with bill-hooks and spades. The land was short of labour and the prisoners were dispersed around the farms of the south and the Midlands and a changing cast was brought to work every day in Norman’s fields. They gave no trouble and moved across the beet fields stolid as cattle, heads down and undemonstrative, and like cattle their mood hung between resentment at being fenced off from freedom and relief at no longer being loose in the wild world beyond their invisible prison walls. And the weather was fine and the land girls were pleasant, if not especially friendly, and Norman worked the prisoners hard but treated them with respect and Jacob would come down to the farm at the end of the day when the airmen werecoming out of the fields and he watched them as they waited in the yard for the bus to arrive, and one or two of them spoke excellent English and he asked them about their planes and what it was like to fly.
    ‘I’m going to be a pilot myself,’ he told them. ‘So people like you will be my enemy then.’
    ‘No, we flyers will always be friends,’ said one. ‘But you’re too young to understand that now.’
    Jacob looked more closely at the man and saw that he was barely twenty himself.
    ‘Well, good luck,’ said the man, as he got on the bus, ‘because you’ll need it against the likes of us. But if you’re a good pilot, flying will keep you young. And if you’re a bad one, well, you’ll never have the chance to grow old.’
    In early September came newspaper reports of the first mass bombing of London, Jacob reading about streams of Heinkels passing above the snaking bends of the Thames around the Docklands and the City, first by day and then by night, the planes silhouetted against orange-tinged clouds above and sheets of flame