The April Rain

Harry Leslie Smith on fate at the end of World War Two.

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 the pavement puddles on my way home to a warm cup of tea, lost in my thoughts and memories.

When I reached the school that stands 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 I 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 and other times spared by fickle fate. In April 1945, I was twenty-two, a member of the RAF and had experienced enough rough scrapes and near misses to last me a lifetime. But somehow, I believed I was going to come out of this war ok because birdsong was in the air, and the scent of lilac blooms told me this was a time for living and not dying.

During that final week of the war, when the months straddled the rain of April and the sun of May, Europe was slowly being reborn. And, I wasn't the only one who felt this because an American fighter pilot flying reconnaissance over the city of Hamburg also felt this on the morning of May 1st. On that day, he flew over the city and swung low over its botanical garden to destroy nazi defensive positions that were erected across the metropolis by the Wehrmacht to turn Hamburg into a death trap against allied soldiers slated to invade in the coming hours.

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 when she thought "I won't live to see peace come".

But then the pilot realised they were young, non-combatants, that the war was nearing its end and that even animosity toward one's enemy can have a best before date soared passed them. As he left them, the pilot tipped his wings to either indicate victory or perhaps peace and disappeared into the horizon.

Fate is so cruel, so random and sometimes so kind. You see, the woman who feared she would not live to see peace became my wife in 1947. I don't know what happened to the pilot. I hope his life after the war was pleasant and loving and that as an old man, he still struggles through the rain of April with the same gallantry he displayed in his youth.