1945-The April Rain

Thoughts on the month of April from Harry Leslie Smith written in 2013.

It rained today, as it does in April. The rain was not bitter with cold. It was just an unpleasant drizzle that made my morning walk uncomfortable. The dog, who dawdled beside me, seemed despondent by the spray that kept his fur moist and my raincoat damp. I sloshed across pavement puddles, lost in thoughts and memories from long ago.

When I reached the schoolyard near my residence, I rested, breathless from my ninety years of life. I looked onto the pitch and saw boys with knees caked in turf and dirt practice rugby. I marvelled at their youth and their passionate pursuit of this one moment in time. My glasses were smeared with rain while the dog panted beside me, and I asked myself: how many Aprils remained for me?

I know not as many as I already experienced as a boy and a young man. I no longer have an abundance of time. It's all behind me now.

I watched those boys at their sport and remembered a spring from my long-ago youth in 1945.

The war against Hitler was spiralling down to its end in a brutal dance of death. The young, old, vulnerable, and unlucky died in those last months of the war with the same indifference given to the flame on a match gutted by the wave of a wrist. During those last gasps of that terrible war, lives were lost but other times, spared by fickle fate.

In April 1945, I was twenty-two and a member of the RAF. I was, on a road to Germany, driving in a military truck from a newly liberated part of Holland. I had experienced, in both war and peace, enough rough scrapes and near misses to last me a lifetime. But I felt the time for living rather than dying was upon me because lilac was in bloom and birdsong was in the air.

As the rain of April fell in 1945, Europe was to be reborn in peace come May. Soldiers dared to believe their future might include the privilege to die in one's bed from old age after drinking life to its last cup.

I was not alone in my belief that a new day where grace and charity for the innocent were near. Although, we never met, I know an American fighter pilot flying reconnaissance over the city of Hamburg on the morning of May 1st believed as I did that forgiveness was no threat to personal survival.

On that day, the pilot flew over the city gutted, burned and in ruins from years of our aerial bombardment. He swung low over its botanical garden park, Planten un Blomen.

Below him were three young women who had come to the park to enjoy the early spring and avoid being rounded up to dig trenches in the city centre by rabid nazis who refused to accept the war was lost.

The young women heard the American fighter plane above, looked up and saw it rapidly descending as if to strafe them.

They had no place to run as the plane came down too fast. First, they were afraid, and then sadness overcame one of them who thought, "I won't live to see peace come".

But above, the pilot knew the war was nearing its end and that even animosity for an enemy must have a best before date soared passed the teenagers. The pilot flew past them and tipped his wings, which indicated victory or perhaps peace and then disappeared into the horizon.

Fate is cruel, random and sometimes so kind because the woman who feared she would not live to see peace became my wife in 1947 and lived until 1999.

The pilot? I don't know what happened to him. I hope, after the war, his life was pleasant and loving and that to this day, he can struggle through the rain of April with the same gallantry he displayed in his youth.

Your subscriptions to my Substack are always appreciated because what I am attempting to do is keep my dad's legacy alive and also the legacy of the working class struggle to achieve dignity, good health, love and purpose in our society that values the entitled too much for its own good. Your subscriptions also keep me housed. Take care, John