Wednesday 9th November

Mathilde – Sunday
Thinking of any of that famous quadruple (??) of big bombers – the Fokker Anvil and the Fokker Hammer, the de Veers Cyclone, or the Avro Delft – or even seeing a black and white picture of one of them in a book makes her feel sad now. It’s not just the memory of that fat, black bellied bomber in her eye line after dad shut the door that night, and the associated ache from the subsequent dissolution of her parents’ marriage: there’s something else, too – her sense of those aeroplanes’ night-centredness, and her knowledge (acquired after the years of innocent model building) of how they were used in the eastern war, the effect that they had on the civilians on the ground, and the post-war (and continuing) moral debates about whether their use in massive carpet bombing attacks against enemy civilians was justified [also hooked up with her perceptions of her relatives who served in the armed forces – particularly Uncle X]. Whereas she used to imagine that the crews of these planes were glamorous professionals, she knows now that most of them were barely trained, little more than boys in age, and she also knows that many of them were far from being heroic or dedicated fighters: some were conscripts, some rejects from the more physically demanding branches of the armed services. [Uncle X as a counterweight to that uncomfortable reality, which somehow detracts from the nobility and moral worth of the enterprise – there’s something here about how the idealised vision is ‘tainted’ by the subsequently modified view of reality (based on more accurate information…]

She used to think of the air war as a clean, technocratic affair, where young men jousted with metal war machines and died all-but-bloodless noble deaths, a view reinforced by the box-top artwork of the model aircraft kits she started building when she was about seven, which showed neatly painted fighter planes zooming towards you out of pale blue, washed out skies, with a smoking enemy aircraft falling away indistinctly into a bank of cloud in the distance. Her thinking is now more realistic and violence-centred: she sees the night bombing operations, for example, in a more ‘narrative reportage’ style, bereft of the romantic emotional connotations that they used to be imbued with. As a dedicated amateur historian of the period, she’s read enough books now to realise that much of the crews’ lives was prosaic and routine-led, and that each bombing trip was the result of an immense bureaucratic and logistical effort, weighed down with theory, long study and reconnaissance, and masses of paperwork, all processed by thousands of clerks and administrative officers; the crews were just the people in charge of the bits of machinery that actually delivered the bombs at the end of those massively complex production line. She finds the thought of the reality of all that system and process a little dispiriting, to tell the truth, and her interest only comes alive when, in her imagination, or in the book she’s currently reading, the bomber crews start to gather in the briefing room, smoking their cigarettes and joshing with each other, talking and laughing loudly and formulaically to disguise their nervousness.

Once the posh briefing officers step out in front of the big target/route map and start talking about weather and logistics, Mathilde’s imagination cuts to the bomber airfield in the dusk, and to the crews smoking their pre-takeoff cigarettes and executing their superstitious rituals in the dusk. In Mathilde’s mind, this scene usually takes place in late summer or early autumn, when the sun has gone down in a spectacular blaze that prefigures the night’s fires, leaving behind a graduated sky of blues and oranges, with a few early stars coming out, white and twinkling in the gathering night.

The squadron’s take off is a tension-filled sequence after the brief picturesque repose under the heartbreakingly beautiful dusk, as the fat bombers lurch and crab their way along the runway and – amazingly – drag themselves up into the evening, bound for distant [Russian] targets.

The journey out is usually uneventful until they reach the Russian lines: the Russian night fighters patrol inside their own territory, concentrated around the big cities that constitute the [Dutch/German] air force’s major targets. These cities are ringed with hundreds of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, and Mathilde’s read about the bomber crews’ increasing sense of trepidation as they approach these conurbations and their protective cones of lights, guns and fighters – how the flyers’ mouths dried out, their voices became silent, and their watchfulness and alertness increased. But she can’t imagine – really imagine – what it must have been like for them, emotionally, so fresh out of school, and so inexperienced in the world, thrown into this nightly tumult, knowing that so many of their friends had died already, and that they themselves stood a high statistical chance of ending their lives in an exploding blaze of metal shards, human flesh, fuel and flame before their tour of operations was completed. She can’t make that leap, so inexperienced is she, never having known real, visceral fear, and never having been close to death, or the dead, or the dying. [linkage??] This inexperience, so close to the surface of her consciousness and sensitivity about her continuing virginity, makes her feel ashamed and stupid; she knows that her lack of experience of the world, and of its deep and profound experiences, disqualifies her from making any judgments of real weight or value. [Perhaps expand on this to emphasise/prefigure her lack of confidence, her sense that all her judgments are provisional, and that they rest on a shifting foundation, in which she can have no firm belief (or something…)?]

[…linkage?]

Her dad had finally left the family home when Mathilde was eleven. There had been more nights of shouted or hissed arguments, more reconciliations and peace makings, and uneasy, stilted silences at the table while they ate their dinners with cutlery whose clanking echoes seemed to deepen and harden the silence between them all, so that they became hyper-conscious of the slightest movement or sound of cutlery on food, plate, tongue or tooth; Mathilde remembers trying to chew her food in absolute silence, so certain was she that the sound of her chewing would draw her dad’s attention and – perhaps – trigger another disagreement or confrontation.

That summer, Mathilde retreated into her own world and room, spending all her free time – school day evenings, weekends and holidays – at her modelling desk, working her way through different phases of obsessive model making, and building up her knowledge of the events of the Eastern war period, and of both sides’ military technology.

[When she was younger, her model-building had been a joint enterprise with her dad – pictures of them in the family album, puzzling theatrically over an instruction sheet – but it now became a solitary affair…how she’d freeze, feeling her shoulders tense and her heart go cold if dad knocked on her door and came in; how she’d retreat into monosyllables, not looking at him and keeping her shoulders square to the modelling desk – her body completely closed to him…???]

[Linkage: feed this back to her memories of lying in the dark in her room (on the cusp of adolescence now), of remembering those days in that foreign hotel room, and to her experience of the NOW, in her room that Sunday night before the school trip….]

(c. 1230 words)