‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting up to take the glass from him. ‘I could get used to this.’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’
He sat opposite her and clinked his glass against hers. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers,’ she echoed. ‘You make an excellent barman,’ she said after she’d taken a sip and savoured the dryness of the liquor.
‘What can I say? It’s a job I pride myself in doing to the best of my ability. And now that I’ve mixed you a perfect drink, please do me the kindness of telling the rest of your story, about you and the burning Walrus.’
She tutted. ‘I knew that was the real reason you invited me here.’
He smiled. ‘You would have been disappointed in me if I hadn’t asked you.’
‘Very well,’ she said softly, as once more the door to the past opened and she allowed herself to be taken back.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tilbrook Hall, Norfolk
April 1944
Romily
To this day I have no recall of the impact. Knocked unconscious, I came round to find myself choking on smoke and being hauled unceremoniously from the cockpit. I was dragged to safety and when I looked back at the Walrus, I saw it was on fire, along with the barn. The heat from the flames was scorching my face. Another one of my lives gone, I thought vaguely as my head spun and my vision blurred to the point I was seeing multiple burning Walruses. I was trying to work out how many lives I was down to, when an almighty boom ripped my eardrums apart and the world exploded.
I was dead. I was convinced of it. The conviction filled me with the sweetest joy as in that moment of certainty I saw Jack right there before me. Hadn’t I promised him that we would be reunited in the afterlife? Filled with euphoria, I stretched out my hand to touch his face. ‘Oh, my darling,’ I said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’
I saw his lips move, but no sound came out. There was a frown creasing his expression. I then realised that the face before me didn’t belong to Jack. The euphoria that had filled me evaporated in an instant.
The frown on the man’s face intensified. Once more his lips moved, but for some inexplicable reason no sound came out. Was he mute? I tried to battle my way through the fog of confusion that was clouding my brain.
I had just recalled the moment when the cockpit had filled with smoke, when my lungs gave a spontaneous heave and I coughed violently. Pain shot through my body and the frowning man now looked at me with increased concern. He spoke again and as before, no words came out. It was then that I became aware of an acrid stench. I twisted my head to my right and saw a colossal inferno, flames reaching high into the sky, creating an angry black cloud of thick smoke. It was, I realised, the burning wreckage of the Walrus and the hay barn I had tried to avoid hitting.
With that understanding came the knowledge that I had been dragged to safety by this brave stranger, and just in time before the fuel in the tank of the Walrus had ignited. Moreover, I comprehended that a fire of that magnitude would make a thunderous roaring noise. But I could hear nothing. I had been rendered deaf as a result of the explosion.
Irrationally I felt proud of myself for reaching this conclusion. I pointed to my ears. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ I said. Or perhaps I shouted the words, I couldn’t tell. ‘The blast.’
He nodded and I gave in to another bout of violent coughing. When it passed, I sat up. It was then I caught sight of my left leg which was twisted at an unfeasible angle. In registering this, I succumbed to a wave of nausea and thoroughly let the side down by being hideously sick.
From somewhere about his person, my brave rescuer produced a handkerchief and began mopping me up.
‘You’re most kind,’ I said (or yelled), as though we were at a cocktail party and not in a field with the burning wreckage of an aeroplane behind us, and my leg pointing the wrong way.
He smiled and for the first time I saw that my knight in shining armour was an extraordinarily handsome man with straight white teeth and dark expressive eyes beneath a pair of thick eyebrows. He was about the same age as me and I’d wager he was not English. He reminded me of a wildly attractive French racing driver I had once known. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, ‘seeing as we’ve been so intimately thrown together?’
His thick brows drawn together, he spoke his name, but I shook my head, unable to make it out. ‘Spell it,’ I said, indicating that he should draw the letters in the air.
‘M . . . A . . . T . . . T . . . E . . . O.’ I said, when his hand came to a stop. ‘Italian?’
He nodded and smiled again.
‘Well Matteo, would you help me to stand, please?’
He looked at me doubtfully, but with great care, he did as I asked. It was when I was upright and leaning heavily against him, wondering where he might take me to get help, and how far that might be, that I noticed he was wearing a uniform that had seen better days. But what was significant about it was that there were large patches sewn on to the jacket and trousers, indicating that he was a prisoner of war. Rather gruesomely the patches were meant as targets should the prisoner attempt to escape.
Without warning, he turned abruptly and scooped me up in his arms. He had gone about a hundred yards, with me fearing he might collapse with the effort, when I saw a number of men running towards us. They had come fortuitously prepared with a couple of stretchers, no doubt in anticipation of more than one casualty from the aircraft that had come down.
I was laid carefully onto a stretcher and transported not so carefully, at speed, across a field where sheep were grazing.
With the woods behind us, I strained my neck to see where we were going, hoping a doctor might be quickly despatched to deal with my broken leg. Frankly I’d be happy with an equine vet if he could administer sufficient morphine into me to numb the pain I was in.
My luck seemed to be continuing. Firstly, I’d been rescued by the handsome Matteo and now I discovered that I had been taken to Tilbrook Hall, a grand old house some five miles from RAF West Raynham. I’d seen it on the maps. It had been requisitioned by the MOD, and not only was it partly used to accommodate prisoners of war, but it was also being used as a hospital for wounded servicemen.
What was more, by the time I was transferred from the stretcher and onto an examination couch, my hearing had begun to return, accompanied with a whistling as though I were under water with a kettle boiling inside my head. But I could hear enough to catch the contemptuous tone of the doctor who was examining me.
He was a stout, flush-faced gentleman of advancing years with monstrously bushy eyebrows, a pince-nez perched on his supercilious nose, together with a disagreeable look of censure.
‘Well, well, well, this is quite the mess you’ve got yourself into, young lady,’ he said, addressing me as though I were a silly young schoolgirl. For good measure, he tutted. ‘This is what comes of you women imagining you can do the work of a man.’