by Thomas Wood
Opening my eyes fully, every sense suddenly ran away from me, as my only focus became the eight .303 machine guns that flanked me in my cockpit. The rattling that filled my ears rumbled its way through my core, shaking at my ears so much that I thought they would begin to bleed.
The sky that had, until recently, been a picture of blue and peacefulness, was now full of glowing fury, as the tracer rounds made their way to the aircraft.
I watched as sparks began to fly as some rounds bounced off the wings of the 109, others penetrating the surface and burrowing their way into the fuselage.
All of a sudden, I found myself flying straight into a cloud of black, at which point my thumb shot back from the trigger and I throttled back.
One of my rounds must have got extremely lucky, somehow finding its way into the fuel tank that sat just behind the cockpit. A great stream of black, like a pot of paint was spilling from underneath, had begun billowing out of the 109.
Instinctively, I climbed, to get out of the way of what could soon be an airworthy fireball. The 109 too, climbed, but banked hard to the right as the pilot inverted his aircraft. There was no hope for him to get home, he knew that he would be bailing out.
I watched and began chanting to myself as he went through the motions of trying to get out.
“Bail out, you fool! Bail out!”
As the billowing black turned to an orange, the man still refused to fall from his aircraft, the hinged cockpit canopy staying well and truly closed.
I continued my warning to the man as I circled over the area of his stricken aircraft, as it rapidly dropped towards the sea, but still he refused to listen.
I wondered for a moment if the man was already dead, or possibly overcome by the fumes that would now be engulfing his cockpit. But, finally, I saw the hatch limply fall open, right about the same time that the whole thing exploded into a huge fireball.
I scanned the area for a few more seconds, holding a circling pattern directly above where the aircraft had been. But there was nothing. There was no parachute opening that I was praying for and, several seconds after the explosion, I resigned myself to the fact that there never would be one.
It was only as I levelled out, that I realised my grave error. At first, I only heard the sound of the air being displaced over the tops of my wings, but then I saw—
“Everything alright, old fruit? You look somewhat distracted.”
As the Whitley bomber continued to drone and wobble around the air, I suddenly realised that it was all over. I was no longer in Hurricanes. I would no longer be nose-to-tail with the enemy and ducking and diving to avoid 109 machine gun rounds.
I was now in the Whitley, preparing to fall through the aperture in the belly of the aircraft, which was far more testing than it had first sounded.
“You jump through that hole there,” the instructor had said, pointing to the gap that had opened up in front of him. “When you go through, make sure you go through the centre of the hole. Keep your body rigid and straight. Whatever you do, do not look down through the hole as you jump. Is that understood?”
“Why not, Sergeant?” Mike had asked. He was the only one who had the confidence to do so.
“Because, if you look down, you bend your body out of shape. And if you do that, there’s a jolly good chance that your nose will be ringing the bell.”
He smirked, which quickly returned to normal as he looked at the puzzled faces all around him.
“Ringing the bell means smacking your lovely little hooters on the inside of the aperture. There will be blood and they will be broken.”
“Why ringing the bell?”
“You should hear the noise it makes. Plus,” he added with a satisfying giggle in the back of his throat, “whoever rings the bell must buy everyone a drink down the pub. Everyone happy with that?”
Not everyone was, especially when having to fork out for twenty drinks, as well as nursing a very badly swollen nose.
It was a fate that I had, until now, avoided completely, but then again, the jumps that I had completed were in broad daylight, where it was easy to see the aperture.
“I’m fine,” I shouted back to Mike over the din of the bellowing engines. “I’m just not sure I have enough money to be ringing the bell.”
He chuckled back and leant into me, “Don’t worry. If you do it, I won’t tell any of the Frenchies on the ground. They’ll be none the wiser.”
He tapped the outside of his nose with his index finger, the international code for keeping a secret, but also a subtle reminder of what might happen if I was to misjudge my jump a little.
We sat in silence for the next half an hour, both of us mulling over what we had done with our lives so far, and what our task would be once we were on the ground.
For me, it was a minefield fraught with tragedy and triumph, which I quickly tried to ignore and instead thought about what might lie ahead.
“Right then, killer boys,” screamed the jumpmaster as he waddled his way towards us. It was a name that the whole crew had assigned to us, instead of getting to know our actual names. Apparently, we weren’t exactly flavour of the month with our Bomber Command counterparts. They weren’t even interested in the fact that we had been the ones who had escorted their flights, multiple times.
“I’ll open the hatch now. You know the drill. You won’t be able to hear me when I do. But keep your eyes on me and watch for the signal.”
We both gave him a thumbs up, as he replaced his mask over his face. Slowly, carefully, trying not to fall out himself, the hinge doors were opened, accentuating the tremendous noise of the engines on either side of us.
As he stepped back, I swung myself around, so that my feet were dangling out of the aircraft, leaning back so as not to get sucked out into the night just yet.
I kept my eyes on the jumpmaster, as I watched his mask flutter and flick around as he presumably spoke to the rest of his crew about the killer boys.
As I sat there, half in the bomber, half out, I couldn’t help but think of what the people on the ground would be thinking.
Did they think that another bombing raid was on its way? Would they all be cowering in their shelters like I had been forced to do myself? Did they despise the crew members that were trying to liberate their country?
Everything was zipping through my mind as quickly as the thumb was thrust up into my face. Shuffling forwards, like the payload that was normally carried by this aircraft, I tumbled out, into the night.
9
I couldn’t help but think of it as the mightiest thunderstorm that I had endured in my entire life. Every roll of thunder was tremendous, enthralling even, and the longer that I stood under its falling might, the longer I wanted to be in amongst the encounter.
As a child, I had been petrified of thunder, the way in which the universe seemed to flex its muscles and display how vicious it could be. My legs, nothing more than a pair of matchsticks back then, would quiver and tremble, until I would be forced to sit down, invariably under the dining room table with my mother.
“Get him out from there,” my father would grumble, pipe in hand, chair facing the window. “He will have to learn to deal with it. Can’t have a Parker scared of the weather. How utterly ridiculous.”
“Leave him be, Walter. He’s just a boy,” my mother, a more compassionate soul than my father, was permanently stationed in my corner, ready to defend me.
“Bah,” my father would mutter, as another clap of thunder rolled around the skies. His face, illuminated by the lightning that followed, would always brighten somehow in the darkness, as if each peal of thunder, displaying the untamed power of the skies, made him happier within.
My father, although expressed dispassionately, had been right, I did have to learn how to deal with it. As I became a more experienced pilot, it would be my duty to fly in adverse weather, to carry out patrols or to test radio equipment.
But then, I was able to deal with it in the most menial of ways. I would
fly high, I would tickle the throttle and climb as high as I needed until the clouds, which buffeted at my wingtips and threatened to throw me from the skies, broke and I was in a comparative heavenly realm of brilliant blue.
As I stood at the foot of the pile of bricks that had once been someone’s home however, I knew that there was no way for me to cope with this kind of thunderstorm. There was no break in the clouds for me to dive through, no dining room table for me to hide under. This was one thunderstorm that I simply could not ignore.
I looked up to the sky, an ominous blue colour, as if someone had left a lamp on in the corner of the heavens, as the fires that had started continued to make ground, against the best efforts of the firemen all around me.
I wiped away at an oily bead of sweat that had started to dribble from my forehead and found it to be an inky black colour. Immediately, I withdrew my handkerchief and began dabbing away at my face, trying in earnest to deny what was going on around me and find some sort of normality.
“Johnny, we should go. We are of no use here. CO will have our heads if we’re much later.”
I looked up at Mike and, for the first time, I sensed the genuine fear and alarm that was coursing through his body. He was experiencing this war with no weapons, with nothing that he could use to fight back, and he was alarmed.
“You go, Mike. I’m going to stay put.”
“And do what?!” he blurted. “Stand there staring at the sky? Come on, let’s go, now.”
My gaze returned to the sky; its odd bluey hue still painted across the heavens. As I stared, my eyes became aware of the searchlights, great pillars of white, against an otherwise dull London sky.
They swept and scanned the skies, crossing one another from time to time in a friendly greeting. I locked on to one such beam, as it bowed westwards, only for it to stop momentarily and backtrack across the sky. From there, it moved more slowly, carefully sweeping the sky now and not in the carefree way it had seemed to before.
I tried to imagine the excitement of the young lads who were operating the searchlight, frantically trying to keep the aircraft in their sights so that a nearby ack-ack gun could have a pop at sending one of them down.
I could have sworn that, over the orchestral volume of noise, I could hear the much older officers, some of whom had fought in the last war, telling them to be quiet and stay focused.
The belly of the doomed aircraft was flashing a brilliant white, as if the light bouncing off it had magnified its strength ten-fold. I watched as it was sent into a left-hand bank and right, and then finally a corkscrew manoeuvre to try and break out from the iron grip of the searchlight.
I couldn’t imagine it was particularly fun for the crew inside, who I suddenly had an immense sympathy for, especially the navigator, whose timings and plottings would have been thrown completely out of the window.
I felt strange, as I felt, rather than saw, the ack-ack guns begin to open up, as a feeling began to surge around my body that I never thought possible. I wanted them to survive.
I felt like calling out ‘Come on! You can do it!’ but instead was rooted to the spot upon which I stood, with nothing coming from my mouth other than the rancid warmness of my breath as I excitedly watched.
Great balls of fury began to explode on either side of the aircraft, as it began to level out, apparently resigned to the fact that they might never be out of the searchlight’s beam. Orange balls began to erupt closer and closer to the aircraft, until there was an ear-splitting bang, accompanied by an even larger sphere of fire, as one of the ack-ack rounds finally hit home.
“Johnny, come on!”
I watched as the inferno that broke out on the starboard wing of the bomber began to light the sky far better than the searchlight ever could.
Slowly at first, the bomber began to lose height, the searchlight still following its demise despite the three hundred other targets that were now roaring overhead. Over time though, it fell into a steep dive, as I imagined the pilot losing control over the beast and giving the order to bail out. That was if they were even still alive.
Within seconds, an orange explosion, as if the sun had risen doubly fast, glowed on the horizon, as the muffled thump reached my ears.
I stared for a few seconds more, as the searchlight went back to work to pick out another victim.
“Go,” I muttered, quietly at first, before realising that the noise around me had drowned me out. “Go, Mike. I’m going to stay here. I can still help.”
His shadowy and moody face stared back at me in utter disbelief and more than a fair share of disappointment.
“Johnny, if you stay here, you’ll end up dead. You might not think it but those wings on your chest are incredibly valuable to this country.”
“And the people buried under those buildings are even more valuable to their families. I’m staying here, Mike. I won’t hold it against you if you don’t want to stay.”
The latter part of what I had said had the desired effect. He knew that I would never hold it against him, but the insinuation that I would do if he was to leave me was far too great a risk for him to take.
“Very well,” he said, unbuttoning his jacket, “but you’re the one going to the CO about why we’re late back.”
“I think he’ll understand, Mike.”
He grunted as if to say that he wasn’t quite so confident but was still more than happy to allow me to be the one to talk to him.
The low drone of engines, some more of a whine than a drone, slowly throbbed back overhead, as more and more ack-ack guns suddenly seemed to burst into life. The noise was fantastic and, had there not been so serious a threat, it all would have been quite enthralling.
“What can we do to help?!” I bellowed to the older man who had shared a cigarette with Mike.
He looked up at me, quite surprised that the two flyboys in front of him were so willing to help. He didn’t seem to have all that much confidence in the RAF in the skies, but perhaps we would be able to restore some of his hope that we could still work hard on the ground.
“Davies Street has taken an absolute pounding. Hop on with those boys there from the AFS. They’ll take you around. Be prepared to see some more bodies though boys.”
Without another word, we scarpered over the rubble and debris that blocked our way, before climbing aboard what looked like an old single-decker bus, complete with hose reels to its rear and a water pump ready for action.
As we slid into the back of the cab, squashed to bursting with at least six other men, I heard a voice call out to us.
“Fank you, lads,” the elderly warden called out, tipping the edge of his helmet towards us. As we trundled away from him, I was not quite sure if it was to the two flyboys who had just offered their assistance, or to the whole crew, who he might never see again.
As the bell began to sound, completely in vain against the plethora of other noises that were far stronger, I began to let my mind wander for the very first time that day.
I started to think about what I had just let myself in for, and what I had coerced Mike into doing. There was a chance that we could get killed here, and I had barely even allowed Mike the opportunity to get to a relative safety.
The young girl, who had held my hand so tightly that I thought I was her only lifeline, kept reappearing in my imagination, as I wondered whether or not anyone had had the courage to tell her that she would not see her brother in the morning. She would, in fact, never see him again.
As the thought came to my mind, there was a pang of guilt from deep within me, that maybe I should have been the one that had divulged the news to her. I had saved her life after all; we had some sort of a special connection.
But she was only a child, a young one. She wouldn’t have understood if I was to simply tell her the news, especially when she was so excited to tell her brother all about her story. I might have felt a pull towards her, but there was no way that she would have appreciated the news coming from me as a result.
“We start at this end and work our way down, alright? We don’t move on until I say so, even when you start hearing them calling out. We have to be thorough here.”
The officer in charge of us all was a stern-faced man, but one who quite clearly had the best of intentions at his core. It was a difficult job, but one that had to be done.
I hopped out of the cab, with an enthusiasm that was quickly quelled by the same thought that I had earlier on, but not had the confidence to voice.
“Mike,” I said, gloomily. “My family, do you reckon they’re alright?”
He sensed the panic in my voice and decided against a half-hearted response.
“Where did you say they were?”
“Richmond.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine, old fruit. What is there that the Germans would even be that interested in, anyway?”
I wasn’t sure. But I was scared for the life of my family all the same.
10
My body began to pulse with utter exhilaration as I tumbled from the aircraft. There was a strange feeling to it all. I was aware that I was falling towards the earth at an alarming rate, but at the same time, it did not feel quite like a fall.
It felt almost as if the wind was trying its hardest to hold me up, like I was in an open palm, being offered up to the gods as some sort of sacrifice. It was marvellous.
The wind rushed down the canals of my ears, twisting and winding their way down hallways and corridors as the air began to burrow into my brain. Had I not felt quite so weightless already, I would have been quite giddy and lightheaded.
