Cleared for Take-Off (1995)

Come of Age

GERMANY, MAY 1945

BELGIUM, 1944

Brussels was liberated by Chris and me on a Monday. I know this because I wrote it down in my pocket diary as we bumped across tram lines and cobbles in the jeep. I wasn’t driving; Chris, my RAF counterpart, was doing that. Bert Cobb, his batman-driver, was slumped anxiously in the back scat, distastefully ducking the bunches of garden flowers :and reaching hands of the screaming. delirious population. It was Monday, the fourth of September.

Sunlight exploded like shell bursts through the dense leaves of the plane trees along the road. People were cheering, waving, singing, shouting, hugging each other. Arms and legs flailed as people scrambled wildly to try and get up on to, or into, the jeep, and Bert Cobb kept scowling and pushing them off. He said they were all bloody barmy. as barmy as the lot in Paris. They had no self-respect or control. Last month in Paris they’d been ‘right loony’.

On that day in Paris the Germans were still banging away. Bullets whined and zinged all about us like mad hornets, chipping the façades of buildings, shattering windows, clanging into the huge brass monuments to past wars. Brussels, it had to be said, was marginally less hysterical because the Germans had pulled out. Marginally. Everyone had gone crazy. If not quite barmy.

A woman in a light flowery summer dress, her hair piled high, suddenly grabbed Chris’s arm to pull him towards her. For a kiss, I suppose? The crowd around her cheered and Chris lost control of the jeep and we idled into a tree. We were only meandering along anyway, in the crush. People chucked more flowers and, for some…