Meanwhile we sent more than seven hundred aircraft to deliver the coup de grace to London. It’s too early for confirmation, but the pilots report that London was ablaze from one end to the other.
Our short-wave broadcasts to the USA need improving, so I shall be taking personal control. There is no point pussy-footing about. Roosevelt is a danger to our plans, because of his ignorance of the issues and receiving too much influence from Churchill. We will seize Roosevelt by the throat and shake him until he falls apart. Few Americans realize that Roosevelt is a cripple.
I have forbidden all mention of Russia in our press. Just for the time being. If nothing else, it will rattle Stalin’s spies.
Hess disappeared as expected. He took off from the Messerschmitt factory in Augsburg on a supposed test flight, then headed off towards the north. He refuelled in Holland before flying out over the sea. To my amazement he followed the flight plan he showed me, so everyone knew exactly where he was. The man is mad, of course, and it has been the devil’s own job keeping him away from the American reporters. The Führer has been concerned about him for some time, it should be said and will now most certainly be said. With Hess gone it will be easier to convince everyone that he had become unstable. This is the line we take if everything goes wrong, as it surely must. Once I was certain Hess was on his way I alerted Reichsmarschall Goering at what I considered to be an appropriate time. The Luftwaffe will no doubt have dealt with the poor man, whose service to the Party has been without parallel. A great National Socialist hero! I shall be busy with this one as soon as we hear the reaction from the English. After that, we can get on with the war. I would like to see Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s faces when they hear about Hess.
If Goering fails to deal with Hess, I shall complain about him again to the Foreign Ministry. It won’t have any real effect, but Goering hates Ribbentrop as much as I do and it will distract them from other things if they engage in another squabble.
To Lanke in the evening, to be with Magda and my children, and to indulge for once in an early night. Everyone around me has been in wonderful high spirits. We all sense that at last the real war is about to begin.
17
Holograph notebooks of J. L. Sawyer
xvii
I told Birgit that I had been called in to work for the Red Cross again, that I would not be gone for long. She asked no questions, offered no complaint. I needed to get away from the house for a while and we both knew it.
I travelled across the country to Lincolnshire, a journey which in peacetime, by car, would take only a few hours. Now, when members of the public were in effect banned from using their cars, public transport was the only way.
The slow train journey, calling at every station and with many unexplained delays, took me the best part of a day and a half, including one night huddling in the dismal waiting-room in Nottingham station after I missed my connection. I was exhausted by the time I reached Barnham, the town closest to my brother’s RAF station, and I counted myself lucky to find a vacant bedroom over the bar in one of the High Street pubs and went straight to bed.
Because I was so tired I assumed I would sleep through the night without interruption, but I felt as if I had only just dropped off when I was woken by the sound of engines.
Aircraft were flying low over the centre of the town, their engines straining and roaring. I thought I was used to the noise of aero engines, near and far, hostile and friendly, but these were entirely different. Waves of deafening sound battered against the sleeping town.
Once the brief panic of being woken by a loud noise started to recede, I realized what was happening. The planes must be taking off from a local airfield. I was fully awake in seconds. I scrambled across the room, threw the window up, then leaned out and craned upwards.
The planes, powerful twin-engined bombers I recognized as Wellingtons, were travelling low above the roofs, swift, dark shapes outlined against the faint glow of moonlit clouds. The sound of the engines was more than a loud roar: it was a physical concussion of noise, beating not only against the walls and windows of the building but creating a perceptible rhythm against my head and chest. I was exhilarated by the endless reverberations, the shattering, thrilling commotion. I soaked up the sound like a man feeling a downpour of rain after a month in the desert. It was a terrifying but enthralling experience, something so powerful and engulfing that I felt it could not be understood until it was shared with others. Yet I realized, with a sudden jolt of surprise, that I seemed to be alone. There was no traffic in the blacked-out street below, there were no pedestrians walking home, no one else standing at a darkened window to stare up at the deafening sky.
Then I thought, then I realized: this is not real.
A sense of dread sank through me, a familiar sick-feeling anxiety that I could no longer trust my senses. Once again I had woken from what I thought was sleep to what I thought was reality: to a lucid imagining.
I could shrink away from it as I had done before, let the sinking feeling of dread course through me and take me with it, waking me up properly and pulling me out of the delusion. This time, though, I chose instead to remain, to experience the illusion to the full.
I stayed at that window while wave after wave of bombers took off across the town, sweeping low over the roofs. I tried to count the planes: fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, more and more, roaring off into the vengeful night.
I rejoiced in the unreality, letting the magnificent crude cacophony of powerful engines flood around me, drowning me in their deluge of sound.
xviii
Barnham is a market town to the west of the Lincolnshire wolds, built of pale red brick and tiles, a windy place that morning, under a sky thick with low, leaden clouds. At the back of the town, beside the railway station, there were stockyards for the weekly livestock markets. In the narrow streets close to the centre of town, the houses were built in terraces, backing on to each other, but there were larger, more prosperous-looking houses where the town started to blend with the countryside. I walked past them, following the main road in the direction of Louth, but found myself in flat, uninteresting farmland, marked out with trees and hedges but with few other features to give ease to the eye. I looked in all directions as I walked, knowing that there were two RAF bases in the immediate vicinity of the town, but I could see no signs of anything that might signify the presence of an airfield: a water tower, hangars, a windsock. I turned back.
A short while later I was walking again down the High Street in the centre of the town, past the pub where I had spent the night. I glanced up at the window where I had imagined I was standing in the dark. It looked smaller from street level, as if even when fully open it would not be large enough for a man to stand by it and lean through. Familiar shops were open along both sides of the main street and people were going about their unexceptional chores of shopping and making deliveries around the town. It was a place rather like Macclesfield, without the interesting Pennine scenery.
I knew my brother was based at RAF Tealby Moor, close to a village of that name, but the direction signs had been taken down all over Britain the previous year. I didn’t want to ask the way: ever since the war began in earnest most people were wary of strangers.