Transposition

By Trevor Summons

World War II was the introduction for many into war. Its effects were devastating on a people unprepared for the ravages that fell from the skies. Transposition tells the story of two families torn to pieces by the conflict. It also explains some of the firmness of the English class system and how hard it was to move from one level to another. Neither family is prepared for the dreadful dilemma facing them when a secret, hidden for 10 years, surfaces. The Mornays and the Blackeys are drawn together in spite of their differences to try and raise two boys into the turmoil of the post-war 50s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 26, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595854462

Trevor Summons

Trevor Summons was born in England two weeks before the start of WWII. On leaving school he went in to the world of sales and traveled throughout the world. In 1982 he immigrated to the USA and after retiring began writing professionally. This is his fourth published book.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

As the German Luftwaffe lifted off from its base in northern France that fateful night of October 17th, 1940, the pilots stared intently out of their small dark windows at the hooded lights that guided them down the runway. As the planes trundled down the airfield, one particular Junkers 88 stood out. It was lower in the body than the others and any bystander would have seen that it took longer to leave the ground than its partners in the squadron. Two enormous bombs were safely secured in the extended bay, and the added shards of sharp razor-like metal encased within their bulbous housings, were the main culprits for the plane’s delayed take-off.

The pilot, Karltin Schmidt, was already a veteran of such raids across the Channel to the many targets that England had to offer. At this early stage of the war, he had already gained a decoration during the disastrous attempts by Goering’s fighters to claim the enemy’s air space in the Battle of Britain. He had backed up the dogfights with covering fire on so many occasions, that each day had blurred into another as the energy had been sucked out of him. Once the decision to withdraw from the fighter attacks had been made, the change to straight bombing runs came as a relief.

He was a family man with a wife back home in Dusseldorf. His blond son of six slept each night with a photo looking down over him. The photo was of his uniformed father proudly shaking hands with Reischmarshal Goering. In turn, Karltin never left the ground without a similar photo of little Karl in his pretty mother’s arms, facing him from the instrument panel behind the stick. He involuntarily glanced at it as the plane finally dragged itself up into the cold night sky.

The instructions that he had received from his base commander at the customary pre-flight briefing were given after the other pilots were dismissed. He was to stick closely with his squadron, until he reached the coast near Portsmouth. Then he was to fly with them up over Southampton Water until two miles from the main target. At this point, he would make a right turn and fly directly east to a small town called Hamble. Here, he would be able to see the undisguised sheds of Mornay’s factory—a company known to the world as manufacturers of fine optical devices.

Military Intelligence had followed up a number of leads regarding Mornay’s, and found out that as well as binoculars, reading glasses and telescopes, a large part of its manufacturing effort was now turned over to the production of a particularly effective sight for night-time bombing. Just the activity that Karltin and his specially designed JU 88 were now engaged upon. The irony of the mission was not lost upon him and his small two-man crew.

The particular details of the 88’s bomb load were not known to the men delivering it, except that the explosion would devastate the immediate area; destroying not only the fabric of the plant, but also any of its personnel still at work. More importantly, the blast would kill anyone cowering inside the strangely named Andersen shelters—small damp shells of corrugated metal with a sandwich of earth to halt any blast and accompanying shrapnel. For months, it was known that the British had been shovelling and hammering to erect these pathetic little hovels, to try to escape the wrath of the Third Reich.

The same intelligence that had located the whereabouts of Mornay’s factory had furnished the information about the shelters. It had prompted a study of how effective these devices were and the resulting experiments had proved that the sharper the shrapnel, the more easily the occupants could be slaughtered. Furthermore, if the bomb exploded within fifty feet, the whole thing would be blown away. Karltin allowed such realizations scant room in his head, as he gripped the stick tightly on the start of his journey of destruction.

His education had been completed as the Weimar Republic ended its days to give way to the glorious new German beginning, under the strong hand of the Fuhrer. It had taught him about the strong blood ties to the English. After all, it was a German that had begun the house of Hanover with the first King George. Saxon mercenaries had colonized the island a thousand years before, and the people generally admired each other.

It was just that having allowed themselves to weaken their resolve after the first war, the British had become linked with the Poles and the French, and then finally rallied around the warmonger Churchill. They had dared to challenge Germany’s right to self-government, and a reversal of the pernicious Versailles Treaty. Karltin smiled grimly at the recollection of how Germany’s foes had ganged up on her, to keep her down and in subservience to her neighbors. It had nearly worked, but the Fuhrer had saved his country, and now intended to neutralize any more aggression.

In common with his fellow Germans, he had swelled with pride at the early reports of the triumphant blitzkrieg as it rolled its way into Poland, and then France. He had reasoned that it was a gesture to the English, that the glorious attack on the British Expeditionary Force had been halted at the beaches of Dunkirk, in order to allow them to scurry away in their motley flotilla of fishing boats. The fools had claimed it as some sort of victory, and had been greeted as heroes on their arrival back home. He knew that any such retreat would be considered cowardly in his own strong culture—and quite rightly so.

No, he was sure the English had lost whatever spunk they had once had when their navy ruled the world, and they took countries almost at will. Sadly, Germany had not had the opportunity to do much more than acquire a few sad places in Africa. Its problems, dealing with the lies and treachery in Europe, stopped it from being able to marshal its forces to better use. All that would now end. The world was ready and waiting. This was truly a Reich that would last a thousand years.

A dim shoreline began to show ahead of him through the Perspex window. As always, his hands grew moist at the prospect of once again intruding into enemy airspace. The English may have become weak morally, but with the help of those accursed Spitfire fighters, they were a terrible threat in the air. Instinctively, he rolled his head around to scan as much of the sky as he could. Although it was clear for the moment, he knew that those single-engine terrors of the sky could appear in a flash of exploding bullets.

His headphones carried no sound apart from the hiss of static, but as he craned his head forward in an effort to make out his present position, he pressed them closer to his head so that he might catch any early warning of attack against his squadron. The Junkers 88 flew straight and level as it raced at five hundred kilometres an hour across the flat sea, three thousand feet below.

The silence was not to last for much longer. The early warning system that the English had managed to deploy had obviously found them. Shore batteries close to the naval dockyard at Portsmouth, began to fire into the sky. Searchlights pierced the darkness and one of the bombers flying closer to the shore than the rest, was lit up in the fluorescent glare of a halogen light. With its load slowing it down, it turned towards the ground and tried to escape the beam. But it could not disappear. As it lumbered around, other beams caught it and gunners aimed their rounds towards its vitals. The technology on the ground however was not sufficient to bring the quarry down. Within a minute or two the plane had escaped into the night, albeit far away from the rest of the squadron, who had benefited from the diversion and slipped past, without harm.

Karltin felt a hand on his shoulder as his navigator began to signal that they were approaching their goal. He watched the man’s hand as he kept the plane level at one thousand meters. The plan called for them to drop to eight hundred, in order that they could accurately deliver the two bombs into the middle of the factory. For this to happen, they needed to be certain to fly across the widest part of the site. Karltin peeled away from the rest and pulled the handle to open the bomb doors.

As the plane shuddered with the change of airflow over the lower fuselage, a searchlight struck a glancing blow across the 88’s starboard wing. Involuntarily, Karltin yanked the stick away from the glare and in so doing, changed the angle of his approach run. It was nine o’clock.

The slight change of direction meant that the plane would now run diagonally across the factory rather than along its widest part. Neither navigator nor pilot saw any reason to reset the plane, which would mean going around again and running the risk of hitting the searchlight’s beam, which was now frantically racing about an empty sky. In any case, there was little time to think, as they only had seconds before the target came under them.

Already, Karltin could hear explosions as some of the squadron began their runs on the city of Southampton. The explosions began with the familiar crump crump sound, accompanied by the rat-a-tat clatter of anti aircraft rounds chattering into the smoky sky. As always the more nervous pilots released their bomb loads at the very first opportunity, and missed the important targets of the docks. No amount of training seemed to be able to cure this involuntary creepback. Even the strategic dropping of flares from high flying target planes, did not alter the inevitability of flyers wanting to escape from the center of the danger area.

His own vessel, now on its new course, raced into the target zone, his bomb aimer stretched out under the cockpit floor, started the count down to release. Karltin stared fixedly into the darkness, trying to make out the features of the gentle landscape. He touched the iron cross hanging on his chest, and then placed his damp fingers on the family photo ahead of him. Sweat broke out on his forehead and he took his hands off the joystick one last time to wipe the moisture from his palms. In his heavy headset, the aimer’s voice rose in intensity as the moment came closer. The plane was now positioned a few hundred meters above the ground, and at its most vulnerable. At the exact moment, Karltin pressed down hard on the red button on the dashboard, and the plane leaped up with the loss of its load.

With the additional lift from its new lightness, Karltin Schmidt pulled backwards on the stick and flew up and away from the explosion, which occurred a few moments beneath him. The navigator looked down to see the bombs exploding outwards and stuck his thumb up towards the sweating pilot. Karltin turned the Junkers round in a wide, continuing circle for the journey back to France. He shared with his crew the inevitable high rush of adrenaline of an escape combined with success.

Out over the Solent he caught up with some of the earlier planes and began the therapeutic act of a relaxed journey home to the sanctity of his airfield, and a good night’s rest. His mind settled on the routines of flight, and did not dwell on the likely effects of what his night’s work had created in the small quiet Hampshire town. If he had given any consideration to what he had done, it would have been purely that he was an instrument of change for a master race, persuading a stubborn people to accept the inevitable.

Karltin Schmidt however, chose not to dwell on such things, and was of course unaware of the details of carnage and horrors that he had left behind. Apart from the death and destruction that remained on the ground, his act of war was to play the first crucial role in the lives of two innocent babies of only a few weeks of age. They were two boys born into the most bloody conflict mankind had ever known, and due to their unfortunate location, that dark night back in October 1940, they were to experience possibly the most bizarre turnabout conceivable for two developing children.

As for the creator of their unhappy plight, Flying Officer Karltin Schmidt of the German Luftwaffe, he was to make four more runs over England, before falling victim to the steel cable of a barrage balloon swaying high above London. It was only two weeks later that he chose to ignore the warnings of his briefing officer about flying low, and at five hundred kilometres per hour, he tore off a wing and perished in the wreck that followed.

The two babies, Roger Mornay and David Blackey were never to know about the final judgement meted out to their tormentor. When Schmidt dropped screaming out of the night sky, they were just five and six weeks old respectively. They only ever knew that they were orphaned due to a German bomb, but its effect impacted their lives in a way far different from the other thirty-five fatalities that October.

It was a night that began in two quite separate ways for the babies. Roger Mornay was the grandson of the original founder of the factory that was the target of Karltin Schmidt; his tiny companion was the son of one of the staff. And yet at the time of their tragedy, they were both in the same vulnerable position.

David Blackey’s mother had been visiting her husband in the works. Although his was a lowly position in the firm—one of a fitter and turner for the many machines used to refine its product—Mornay’s prided itself on its family-like atmosphere. The company welcomed the occasional visit from wives and off-spring, particularly if they brought along a hot flask of tea to keep their menfolk going through the evening shift. Mags Blackey was always welcome through the gate, pushing her iron pram with its cherished load of the latest child that would no doubt one day be a proud worker in the company tradition. She delivered her flask and a paper bag of sandwiches to her young husband William, and then took some time to talk to a couple of her friends who were helping the war effort with their skills.

The Blackeys had been married just twelve months when their baby was born. Long enough, after the simple ceremony that took place in the little Norman church five miles away, to halt any possible wagging of tongues. Mags had not let her Billy go all the way before the wedding. It had been a deadly struggle, mostly against her own growing desires, as the two would wander the Hampshire lanes and fields through the summer of 1939. She had known the Blackey family since she had moved to Hampshire from neighboring Dorset when she was fourteen. Her father had driven one of the local buses, and soon became known to all the regulars at the local pub The Queens Arms, when he was off-duty. He was a freemason and it was at the local lodge that he befriended Fred Blackey—a retired miner from the Midlands.

Although Fred’s son, William Blackey, was a year ahead of Mags, she caught his eye in the playground most days as he was playing with his friends. He was a thin boy with hands that seemed to stick out too far from his wrists. He also had the biggest feet that Mags had ever seen. There was usually a soft layer of dirt over his face by the afternoon, from ragging around in the dust. But every morning he arrived at school shining like a new pin; evidence of his mother’s diligence in keeping her two men a reflection of her own morality of clean outside, clean inside.

Mags was a dark-eyed girl with long straight reddish hair that was a constant problem to her own mother, in that she believed no man would look at a woman that did not have a decent wave in her locks. As a result, Mags was always being dragged in front of one set of curling tongs or another, in the fruitless search for some change in the fall of her hair. She submitted to this treatment with her customary good humor, knowing that within an hour or two she would be back to normal, and her mother’s tut-tutting.

She was not shy exactly, but tended to keep herself apart from the noisy crowd that congregated in the playground at St. Andrew’s School. She had some friends but called no-one extra special, which allowed her to keep her eye on Billy for the better part of a year before he spoke to her. And another two years before they started to go out together. Their courtship began a day or two after Hitler began his political moves into Europe. Billy had tried to enlist, but his feet as well as being exceptionally large, were considered too flat to perform the necessary marching that was required for any soldier of the King.

In spite of this, it did not seem to cause him any discomfort, as he and Mags began walking to the various sights around their home area. His mother, Elsie, had died the previous summer. He was eighteen and just two years into an apprenticeship at Mornay’s. His father, wracked with grief, had stumbled around for two months, and then confessed to his son that he could not be in the same house that he had shared with his now dead wife. He had organized a half share for Billy of the small insurance policy that he had taken out on Elsie, and also arranged for his only son to lodge with a family that took in young men. As for himself, he needed to come to terms with his loneliness, and was going to move to the other side of London, where he had spent some happy times visiting a long dead aunt and uncle. It was a tiny hamlet called Paddock End. It sat on a small river known for its trout, and it was far away from any likely targets for German attacks. For, as Fred Blackey said, he was damned if he was going to be hunted down by the same Hun that he had stood up to his knees in mud fighting, some twenty years before.

Billy was by now well ensconced in the life of the factory and, although the death of his mother caused him bad nights, and a level of sadness that he had never known before, he was able to escape within the routines of each working day. Also he had the prospect of Mags ahead, whom he knew liked him. If only he could pluck up the courage to ask her out. She was working at the local hospital as a nurse, and he often saw her getting off the bus down the street from his digs.

She looked terribly pretty in her uniform, with its cape with red lining that would sometimes fly back in the wind, revealing a crisp white blouse and blue strapped top. Her slim legs were always encased in black stockings, that Billy found rather erotic. One Friday night, he arranged to be passing as she stepped down on the pavement. Her piercing blue green eyes smiled at him, and he lost his confidence immediately. Fortunately, she came to the rescue, with a cheerful Hello.

He fell into step with her and stammered out an invitation to the cinema the next night. He was amazed at how clammy his hands had become, and how his pulse hammered in his ear. She agreed to meet him at six o’clock the next evening, and waved her hand as she went down the small pathway to her house. Billy stood for a moment, hardly able to believe that he had done it. And then in an instant, the same hammering started up again, with the realization that in less than twenty-four hours he was going to have to spend a lot longer than the short spell from the bus stop.

As things turned out, the film was dreadful. A pot-boiler about an Italian family in America, that left them laughing in the wrong parts, much to the annoyance of a couple of old ladies in front of them. It was the first of many times when they found their two senses of humor out of step with others. Billy almost choked in the cinema cafe afterwards, as she related one of the scenes of the films, in a strong Dorset accent. It was the first time that he fully registered that she had a soft country burr in her speech.

And so they began to go out regularly. At first it was just on Saturday nights to the cinema. Then during the winter, they would take bus rides out to the shore, and to the New Forest. Both of them knew almost from the start, that there would be no others for them. But it took Billy until the late spring to ask for Mags hand in marriage. She did not hesitate for even a second. They fixed the date for the second Saturday in September. It was a small and quiet affair, with just Fred Blackey and some workmates on Billy side of the aisle, and a couple of aunts and her parents on Mags’.

Finally, with the terrifying risk of out-of-wedlock pregnancy gone, they fell upon themselves on their wedding night in a draughty room in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. It was a hotel that a number of the fellows at Mornay’s had used for their own nuptials. Its main attraction being that it was cheap for newly weds. Billy and Mags didn’t mind the fact that it rained most of the five days that they were there. They went out for food and occasionally for a drink in one of the pubs on the front. They spoke to no one other than waiters and waitresses, or bar staff. They lived only for each other, and stood holding hands at the rail, watching the receding pier, as the ferry churned its way back to the mainland at Southampton.

Mags went back to her nursing as soon as they returned, and Billy, showing some unaccustomed maturity with his finances for a change, used his mother’s insurance money as a down payment on a small house, just walking distance from his work. Mags still had to take the bus, but the journey was only ten minutes or so.

The only difficulty that was in their lives, was the poor health of her parents. Her father suffered badly with arthritis and her mother, who had always been weak, was now in hospital following a stroke. It was not expected that she would ever come out again. Her condition meant that every four or five days, the newly weds would make the trip to the big hospital to sit beside the woman who could not speak, and who gazed at them with weeping eyes and open mouth. Mags often would cry on the way back home in the dark interior of the bus.

Throughout all this time, the war built up in intensity. Bombing raids struck various parts of the country, and planes would sometimes be heard, then seen, overhead in the Hampshire skies. Life continued, nonetheless, and as far as she could tell, it was around Christmas that Mags became pregnant. Billy had never liked contraceptives, and they had both tried to be careful. Mags had received contrary advice from her two aunts. One said that the safe time was the middle of the month, the other said the safe time was at the start. It was all rather confusing. Many of her friends at the hospital where she worked also gave advice about keeping out of the family way.

By February, she was horribly sick each morning. By April, she was feeling as big as a house. Billy laughed when he used to find her staring at her full profile in the mirror. He loved her new roundness and told her so. But she did not enjoy this new shape, and fretted that she would never get back to normal.

Throughout the summer of 1940 the Germans continued to press their superior numbers upon the Royal Air Force. The daily newspapers tried to put a brave face on the defence of the realm, but each night, as the waiting population listened to the BBC’s nightly broadcast, they could tell that they desperately needed some break from the relentless attacks. Mags and Billy tried their best to look beyond the war, and see a future for themselves and their new baby.

By now Mags had given up her nursing post, and waited out her confinement with walks and lonely visits to her mother in hospital. She had grown accustomed to the empty shell that had become of her strict mother, and did her best to comfort her sad father. Billy’s continued good outlook kept her from becoming severely depressed herself. And the brilliant summer that the countryside was enjoying helped everyone believe that there would be a time when they could live their lives in peace and silence.

On Sundays the newly weds would attend the local parish church and lower their heads in prayers for a cessation of hostilities. The Reverend Marsh’s booming voice echoed round the same dusty walls and pillars of the aisle that Billy and Mags had walked down so proudly a year before. The congregation was noticeably lacking in young men. Billy was one of only three or four locals involved in what was termed, work, vital to the national interest.

In spite of the lack of tenor and baritone voices, the hymn singing was delivered with gusto, and the Amens carried a conviction that had been noticeably absent during peacetime. Reverend Marsh accepted the enthusiasm as a mixed blessing.

Eventually the time for Mags delivery arrived. She was taken to a small private nursing home in one of Billy’s friend’s cars. This friend used it to deliver groceries and was able to obtain some extra rationing for petrol. After fondly kissing Mags at the doorstep to the facility, the two men escaped to the Queens Arms, leaving her to the ministrations of the staff of women. Billy felt guilty that he had run from the scene quite so enthusiastically. Nonetheless, the watery beer that was on sale eventually overcame this feeling, along with the companionship of the older men in the public bar.

There was a lot of advice given. Most in the QA, as it was known locally, had raised families, and were full of hints for the imminent father: from how to get a decent night’s sleep to how to change the baby’s diapers, without sticking it with the safety pin. Many of the men made a number of questionable comments about how long it would be before Mags got pregnant again. Billy pretended that he didn’t hear anything.

The next evening, standing in a public phone box, he learned of his son’s safe delivery. He felt tears well up in his eyes. The businesslike sounding nurse told him that visiting hours were over for the day, and he would not be welcome until tomorrow morning. He had pulled himself together by the time he reached the Queens Arms for the second time that week.

The boy was perfect. Mags was tired but healthy, and blooming by the time Billy had brought her home. They called him David, and he was installed in a small bright room at the back of the house, and gradually the three of them began to adapt to their new life together. Mags found nursing the baby herself too difficult, and so it meant that even though he was often tired from his work at the factory, Billy would wake up for the two o’clock feed, and nestle the tiny baby in his arms as the warm milk was sucked down.

If it were not for the constant fear of the war, life would have been perfect for the young Blackey family. But they were to know this existence for such a short time. Mags had only been her real self for a day or two, when she took that fateful walk back out of Mornay’s factory.

Just outside the gates the lonely wail of a siren started up. It was carried on the wind from down The Solent, over Portsmouth way. At first Mags took little notice. The wretched things were often going off at all times of the day or night, with the result that people waited until the closer sirens became more insistent. She continued down the street, and then the local siren began.

It started as no more than a feeling; a vibration in the air, but then the low bass note could be heard rising up through baritone to contralto and finally settling on soprano as it throbbed across the dark land. Mags knew that she had to get out of harms way. Just as soon as she began to look around, a car pulled up alongside her and a couple joined her on the street. It was very dark, and at first she didn’t recognise them.

The woman was carrying a small baby in her arms and the man was indicating the entrance to a shelter squeezed between two houses. He flicked on a cigarette lighter to help them find their way down into the dank interior. Two benches ran along each side, and the three adults sat down as the first sound of planes came to them through the flimsy door.

I’m not very happy with this place. The man’s voice was cultured and he twisted about on the bench alongside his wife.

Look, I’m going to pop outside and collect David’s cot.

Can you get his little jacket while you’re there, darling? Like the man, the woman’s voice was also from the higher region of society.

You’re Mr. and Mrs. Mornay, aren’t you? Mags had seen the couple many times before, as they were often out together in the small town.

Yes, we were just having a look round before going over to the church hall. I’m sorry, but I don’t know if we’ve actually met.

At that moment, Walter Mornay came through the door and flicked on his lighter once more.

Look, Rita, lets put him on the ground at our feet. There’s more protection down there. Oh, I’m sorry, Ma’am, I didn’t know you had a little one there too. There’s plenty of room in this cot. Put your baby in with David if you like. I’m never too sure about these places. We have to think about the little ones don’t we?

Walter Mornay was a member of