Ash and Gold

The piano in Tottenham Court Road station sounded like it had been through a war. It did— one of the brewery on Tottenham Court Road had been bombed in May, and someone had dragged the piano underground two weeks later, probably because it was the only piece of furniture that still worked and the war had made everyone sentimental about furniture that still worked.

Tom Harrington-Russell found it at 11 p.m. on a Friday in May 1943, during an air raid that was close but not direct. The anti-aircraft guns were thundering above ground, and the shelter was full of people who had been walking home and now couldn't go home, and the piano was at the far end of the platform, and someone—a woman—was playing it.

She was playing Chopin. Nocturne in E Flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2. The one that sounds like a person remembering something beautiful and being sorry about it.

Tom stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. He wasn't a musician. He couldn't tell you what key it was in or who wrote it or why the third measure made his throat tighten. He just knew that in the three months he'd been flying Halifax bombers over Germany, he had never heard anything that sounded as false as the world above ground and as true as this woman playing a bombed-out piano in a London underground station.

When she finished, nobody clapped. People in shelters didn't clap. They just stopped talking and breathed in the same direction for a few seconds, like a room full of people sharing the same oxygen.

Then a child started crying, and the moment was over.

He walked up to her. "You play well."

She looked up. She was young—twenty, twenty-one—with dark hair pulled back in a knot that was failing and eyes that had seen too much for someone so young but hadn't gone soft about it. She had Irish features, or maybe just features that suggested Ireland somewhere in them—the kind of face that could be from Dublin or Boston or the south side of Chicago.

"Thank you," she said. "It makes me forget where I am."

"Me too."

She wiped her hands on her skirt. "I'm Nora."

"Tom."

"I know," she said. "I've seen your squadron. Harrington-Russells always stand out. You look like your father."

He was surprised. "You know who I am?"

"Everyone in this station knows who you are. You're the ones who come down when you can. You're the ones who don't."

She started packing her sheet music—Bob Dylan lyrics, Joan Baez arrangements, some Irish folk songs she'd learned from her mother. She was a singer, he realized. Or she had been, before the war made singing impractical.

"Do you mind if I sit nearby?" he asked. "The bombing— it's better when there's music."

"There's no music in bombing, Captain. There's only noise."

"But you play music."

"I play what keeps me from being only noise."

They met in the hours between raids. She would be at the station piano after a curfew, playing for whoever could not sleep. He would find her, sometimes alone, sometimes with a small group of soldiers who had learned that Nora Brennan's piano was the nearest thing to home that any of them would experience during the war.

He didn't understand music. He understood engineering—the way a Halifax's engines worked, the way fuel mixtures affected range, the way a plane felt in turbulence. He understood the mechanical world. She lived in the world of sound, which to him was even more mysterious than flying.

One evening, after a particularly rough night—four squadrons out, six planes not returning— he found her playing an Irish folk song. Something slow and minor-keyed, the kind of thing that makes men who have never cried in their lives sit down on a station bench and put their heads in their hands.

"What is that?" he asked.

"An old song. My mother used to sing it when I was seven. It doesn't have a name."

"It has a name."

"Not one that matters."

He sat on the platform edge, his legs dangling over the track, his uniform coat smelling of aviation fuel and damp wool. "Can you play something for me? Not Chopin. Something from your home."

She thought about it. Then she played a melody that was not Chopin and not the folk song. It was something else—something that sounded like a place he'd never been but wanted to visit.

"My mother would play this when the neighbors came over," Nora said after. "Drunken men with fiddles and women with pots of tea. The flat in Dublin was small, but on Sunday evenings it felt like a palace because everyone was laughing and the walls couldn't contain it."

"Describe it to me."

"What?"

"Your mother. The flat. The laughing. Describe it."

She looked at him. "Why?"

"Because I'm going to Germany tomorrow and I need something to remember that isn't a target map."

She played it slowly, measure by measure, and he listened the way you listen when you know you're hearing something that will matter in ten years, even if you can't feel it yet.

The mission was planned for August 1944. Target: a munitions factory in the Ruhr valley. Eight hundred and forty-three bombers. One hundred and seventy-four would not come back.

Tom knew the numbers. Every pilot knew the numbers. You don't volunteer for the RAF's bombing command without knowing what the odds are. But knowing the odds and experiencing them are two different things. The odds are a number on a page. Experiencing them is looking at the row of seats beside you and knowing that three of them will be empty on Monday morning.

The night before the mission, he went to the station one last time.

Nora was there, at the piano, playing for nobody in particular. There were only three people in the shelter that night— an old woman who wouldn't leave, a young couple holding hands, and a man who'd lost a leg and was staring at the tiled wall the way you stare at something that will never speak back.

Tom sat on the platform. Nora played. The war happened above them.

When she finished, she said, "Come back."

"I'll try."

"That's not a promise."

"No. It's not."

She looked at him. Her eyes were not wet, but they were close. "Tom. Don't try. Come back."

He wanted to promise her. He wanted to say yes, of course I'll come back, what kind of fool do you think I am. But he was a pilot in a war where young men died in their sleep in planes that fell out of the sky for no reason, and "of course" was a word that had lost its meaning.

"I'll try," he said again.

It was the truest thing he could offer.

He didn't come back.

The list came on a Wednesday. Tom's name was on it. Not killed— that would have been simpler. Missing. Presumed Lost. There's a difference. "Killed" means you died. "Missing" means you're somewhere over Germany in a metal tube that's falling through a sky full of flak, and tomorrow morning you might be on a list and the next day you might be in a hospital in France and the day after that you might walk through the door of a pub in East Anglia with a face full of soot and a laugh that sounds like someone who just got lucky.

But he wasn't. He was in a Halifax, over the Ruhr, and the flak was thick, and the night was dark, and he was twenty-four years old and he was gone.

Nora did not cry. She stood in the station shelter, looked at the list posted on the station wall, read his name, and then walked home in the rain without an umbrella and sat on her bed and thought about the way he'd sat on the platform with his legs dangling over the track, listening to a song he couldn't name.

She thought about it for three days. On the fourth day, she went back to the station piano.

She played for the shelter. She played for the soldiers who came down after raids and sat in the dark and tried to remember what peace felt like. She played for the old woman who wouldn't leave, for the young couple, for the man with one leg. She played for Tom.

She didn't play Chopin. She played the Irish song. The one without a name.

She compiled his flight log after the war. It was a thin book—twelve flights recorded in his neat, angular handwriting, with notes about weather, fuel load, and target coordinates. On the last page, he'd written something that wasn't a coordinate.

"To Nora," it said. "If you're reading this, I didn't come back. I'm sorry. The song without a name— I finally learned it. It's called 'The Wind That Shakes the Willow.' I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to know that even a pilot knows his songs are ending."

She published the flight log with a foreword of three pages. It was titled Ash and Gold. The foreword read:

"They were not heroes. Tom was not a hero. He was a young man who got on a machine at the right time and flew toward a target at the wrong time. But 'right time' and 'wrong time' mean different things to different people. To the country, they were heroes because heroes are easier to understand than statistics. And the statistic—843 bombers, 174 lost—is something the human mind cannot hold. So we turn it into heroes. We turn it into stories. We turn it into ash and gold."

She never married. She organized the air force widows into a mutual support network that lasted thirty years. She wrote books, played piano, and tended a garden in Kent that she called "the place where things grow even when nothing makes sense."

On her deathbed at eighty-nine, someone asked her if she regretted anything.

"Not the war," she said. "Not Tom. I regret that I didn't play the song louder that last night. I played it soft, like I was apologizing for it. It was the most beautiful thing I knew. I should have played it like the world was listening."

She closed her eyes. She played a chord on the air, her fingers moving over nothing.

The chord was C major. Clean. True. Final.

Author Note & Copyright: