By the time the English coast came into view (“Thank you, Lord,” he heard Norman say) they were almost running on empty and there wasn’t much more fuel to be coaxed out of the tanks. George had spent the last few hours fixing the wireless and managed to put out a “darkie” call for an emergency landing but everywhere seemed to have closed up shop for the night. They were so low over land now that when they flew over a railway line they could see a train snaking below, the red-hot glow from the firebox of the engine escaping from its blackout shields. He didn’t fancy their chances of parachuting successfully from this height and told them to assume crash positions, which meant not much more than bracing themselves against anything handy, but then at the last minute a coolly competent female voice at Scampton gave them permission to land and Norman said, “We can do it, skipper,” and they did, more, Teddy thought, by wishing it to be so than by any skill on his part. If seven minds working as one could fly an aircraft on willpower alone then they did. Six minds, it turned out.
They didn’t quite manage to make it to the runway. Lacking hydraulics Teddy couldn’t use the flaps and the undercarriage wouldn’t come down so they made a wheels-up landing at 150 mph, overshooting the runway, smashing through the perimeter hedge, careering into a field, bouncing over a road, almost clipping the gable-end of a row of farm cottages before slewing through another hedge and ploughing up a field in which they finally slithered to a juddering, bone-shaking stop. Several of the crew were propelled into the forward bulkhead so that, bruised and battered, it took them a while to clamber up the ladder out of the upper escape hatch. The aircraft had immediately filled with acrid smoke and Teddy, standing at the foot of the ladder to shepherd them out, urged them to be “as quick as you can, lads.” He counted them out. Two missing, one of whom was Kenny. No sign of the mid-upper either.
When Teddy finally got out he could see that the rear-turret was still attached but the rest of the aircraft was pretty much in pieces. J-Jig had left a trail behind her—wheels, wings, engines, fuel tanks, like a wanton woman divesting herself of clothing. What was left of the fuselage was on fire and he found his dazed crew gathered around the rear-turret where Kenny seemed to be trapped, Keith yelling at him, “Get out, you stupid bugger!” although he clearly couldn’t as the doors of the turret were jammed and wouldn’t rotate.
Oh, ye gods, Teddy thought, was there to be no end to this nightmare op? Would it be just one horror followed by another? Yes, he supposed, for wasn’t that what war was?
The fuselage was burning fiercely now behind Kenny, and Teddy thought with horror of the belts of ammunition that fed the guns and wondered how long before the fire found them. Kenny was screaming his head off, expletives that later even Keith said he had never heard before. Were they all going to have to watch him burn to death?
There was a small panel in the turret where the Perspex had been removed to give the rear-gunner a clearer view (as well as freezing him half to death) and they began to exhort Kenny to try to climb through this tiny aperture. He had already managed to divest himself of his bulky heated suit but was still encumbered by his uniform.
Once, on a trip to the zoo in London, Teddy had seen an octopus squeeze itself through an impossibly small hole, a party trick that the keeper was keen to demonstrate to small boys. But the octopus had not been hampered by a battledress jacket and bulky flying boots and neither was it in possession of a skeleton. But if anyone could perform this Houdini-like trick it was their little rat-like rear-gunner.
He managed to get his head out and started to wriggle his shoulders through. Teddy imagined it was rather like being born, although he was hazy about the mechanics of that act. Once Kenny had manoeuvred his shoulders through the gap they grabbed hold of him and pulled and pulled, everyone yelling their heads off, until suddenly he simply popped out like a cork from a bottle or Jonah being vomited up by the whale. But then, to their alarm, instead of immediately jumping down he disentangled himself from their grasp and reached his head and an arm back through the hole into the turret, emerging triumphantly a second later, bearing aloft one tatty and very lucky black cat.
Then they all ran like hell to get away from the remains of the aircraft, which a minute later exploded, bright tongues of white flame licking the dawn sky, thanks to the oxygen bottles, followed by a nasty popping and spattering from the ammunition belts.
And that was the end of poor J-Jig who, workhorse that she was, had carried them to hell and back in her stinking, oily belly.
“She was a good kite,” Keith said, performing the eulogy. She was, they all agreed.
“RIP,” Kenny said.
The occupants of the cottages had had a rude awakening, but a nice motherly woman brought out a tray with mugs of tea on it. The farmer appeared and castigated them for destroying his cabbages and was himself chastised by the motherly woman, by which time a truck from Scampton had pulled up to give them a lift back to the station, where they were given breakfast and then had to wait for transport back to their own squadron.
All they wanted was sleep and the journey back seemed interminable. Even when they arrived back they still had to go through the usual routine of reporting to an intelligence officer. They were grey with fatigue, their faces still creased from their oxygen masks, almost deaf from the din of J-Jig’s engines. Teddy had a pounding headache, which was usual at the end of a trip.
It was almost lunchtime by then, although they were still awarded their customary mugs of tea laced with tots of rum and the chaplain did the rounds with cigarettes and biscuits and said, “Good to see you back, boys.” The ground crew had waited up for them until they heard from Scampton that they were safe and the CO hadn’t been to sleep at all and sat in on their debriefing with the intelligence officer. They were his longest-serving crew and he was paternally fond of them. Turin had been their twenty-eighth op.
They had landed without the odd bod. They worked out that he must have bailed out pretty sharpish when Teddy first ordered them to abandon J-Jig. That had been over France. Hadn’t it? Or over the North Sea. Teddy was so tired he could barely remember his own name, let alone the finer details of the harrowing return. He certainly couldn’t remember the odd bod’s name.
“Fred, I think,” George Carr said. “Frank,” according to Norman. “Definitely something beginning with an ‘F,’ ” they agreed and the intelligence officer had to riffle through her paperwork before saying, “An ‘H’ actually. Harold Wilkinson.”
“Close,” George Carr said.
Mac had no memory at all of the anoxia, said he didn’t even know the words to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” although they never stopped singing it to him on the crew binge that followed Turin. They had forty-eight hours’ leave and they slept for half of that and then got blind drunk in Bettys Bar in York for the other half.
After the war, a long time after the war, Teddy did a bit of investigating to see if he could find out what happened to the odd bod. There were no reports of him parachuting successfully, of evading or of being taken prisoner. He was one of the missing and eventually his name appeared on the Runnymede memorial for the men who had no known grave, where he was remembered as Harold Wilkinson, not “the odd bod.” “Silly clot,” Vic Bennett said. “He should have had more faith in his pilot, shouldn’t he? Can’t believe I missed the excitement.”
They weren’t as late returning as the crew of A-Able, who had been on the same raid as them to Turin but had diverted on the way home to Algiers when two of their engines were knocked out. They had been posted as officially missing by the time they got back to the station. Their Halifax, much to everyone’s delight, was loaded down with crates of oranges, which were distributed around the squadron, some going to the local primary school. Teddy ate his orange very slowly, savouring every segment and thinking about hot slices of Mediterranean sun he never expected to see again. He didn’t. After the war Teddy never went abroad again, never took a foreign holiday, never stepped on board a modern aircraft or to
ok a boat on the sea. Viola told him that this “isolationist policy” was “pathetic” and he said it wasn’t a policy, it was just the way things had happened. Nor was it “jingoistic” and “xenophobic”—another two words in her arsenal. She accused him of having “no sense of adventure,” and he thought that the war had provided enough “adventure” for several lifetimes and a man could nurture himself just as well in his own garden. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” he said to her, but she had never heard of Candide. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard of Voltaire.
Bomb doors open, skipper.”
“OK, bomb-aimer.”
“Steady, skipper. Left. Left. Steady. Right a bit. Steady, steady. Bombs gone.”
S-Sugar bounced up in the air, relieved of her burden of bombs. No escape yet for them though as they had to carry on flying over the target, straight and level for another thirty seconds or so while the photo-flash flare dropped and the camera in the bomb-bay shuttered and took the photograph. It was their proof that they had been on the bombing-run—without it, it might not count as an op—but God knows what anyone would see when they scrutinized the results, Teddy thought. There was complete cloud cover over the target and add to that the sooty industrial miasma that permanently cloaked the Ruhr and it could have been the surface of the moon down there for all they knew. They had bombed on sky markers laid down by the newly formed Pathfinder force and hoped for the best.
Later, much later, after the war, when all the history books and memoirs and biographies started to come out and people stopped wanting to forget the war and started wanting to remember it, Teddy had looked into this raid and discovered that a large part of the force had bombed a place ten miles west of the target, and, on balance, probably more damage had been suffered by the bombers than by anyone on the ground. The more he read, the more he discovered how inaccurate their bombing had been in those earlier years. He had talked about this with Mac at the reunion dinner. “What a waste,” Teddy said. “A waste of bombs,” Mac said. Teddy supposed that as a navigator Mac felt personally slighted. “Well, that wasn’t really what I meant,” Teddy demurred. “So many men and aircraft lost for so little result. We thought we were crippling their economy but a lot of the time we were killing women and children.”
“Can’t believe you’ve joined the hand-wringers, Ted.”
“I haven’t,” he protested.
“They started it, Ted,” Mac said.
And we finished it, Teddy thought. He was glad that he had sat out the last eighteen months of the war in a POW camp, hadn’t witnessed Bomber Command trying to remove Germany from the map of Europe.
It was the backstop of every argument. They started it. They sowed the wind. They asked for it. The clichés thrown up by war. “An eye for an eye,” Mac said. “And you can say what you like, Ted, but a good German is still a dead German.” (All of them, Teddy wondered? Even now?)
“I know. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bombed them,” Teddy said, “but with hindsight—”
“The question is, Ted, with all your so-called ‘hindsight’ would you do it again, if asked?”
He would. Of course he would (Auschwitz, Treblinka), but he didn’t give Mac the satisfaction of an answer.
The camera shuttered and Teddy banked S-Sugar away and Mac set the course for the homeward leg. “That wasn’t so bad,” the second dickey said. (Guy, wasn’t it? Teddy wasn’t sure. He seemed like a Guy. Or was it Giles?) Two or three voices groaned on the intercom. It was considered particularly bad luck to say a thing like that. “Long way to go yet,” Teddy said. And indeed the flak was as bad, if not worse, on the way out as it had been on the way in. They could feel the blast from the ack-ack shells bursting all around them and the jar and thud as splinters of flak hit the fuselage.
There was a sudden blinding flash on the port side as a Lancaster was hit in the wing. The wing was blown off and sheared through the air under its own volition until it hurtled into another Lancaster, slicing off its mid-upper turret. Both Lancasters then spiralled down to earth, almost balletic in their fiery fall.
“Fuck,” a horrified voice said over the intercom. Vic or George, Teddy wasn’t sure. Fuck, indeed, he thought silently. He sent Norman back to assess the flak damage. “Bloody big hole,” he said. They hardly needed telling this, there was an Arctic gale blowing through S-Sugar. Guy seemed to have changed his mind about how bad it was and he indicated to Teddy that he was going to the back of the aircraft to acquaint himself with the unsavoury Elsan. Guy. Went to Eton. Must remember, Teddy berated himself. The lost odd bod from Somerset had left him feeling guilty, derelict in his duty. Everyone on the aircraft was his responsibility, after all. The least he could do was to remember their names, for heaven’s sake. Guy never came back because at that moment both gunners started yelling down the intercom at once, “Fighter port quarter, corkscrew port, go!” and Teddy rammed the control column forward, but not before they were hit by cannon fire from a fighter, a great rattling like some sky god throwing stones at the fuselage. The stink of cordite fumes filled the aircraft.
Teddy had thrown J-Jig into a steep dive but by the time he had banked to starboard and started to climb back up the fighter had gone without Teddy ever having seen it. It didn’t come back, disappearing as mysteriously as it had appeared. Mac set a direct course for home, avoiding the heavily defended areas around Rotterdam and Amsterdam, but by the time they reached the Dutch coast they were down to two thousand feet. The fighter had done its work. The port and starboard inners were out, the starboard aileron gone, and five wing tanks were perforated. There was also a big gash in the fuselage. Teddy feathered the useless engines and they persevered, too late to turn back as they had been flying through cloud and when they finally came out of it they were well over the North Sea.
For a while another straggling Halifax formatted with them, but they were flying so low and slow that their companion gave up on them and climbed away with a farewell waggle of her wings. They were alone.
At fifteen hundred feet Teddy told his crew to prepare for ditching. Ten miles to the English coast, he reported calmly. “Get us a bit closer, skipper,” someone said. The idea of ditching was bad enough but to go down in the drink and be picked up by Germans was unthinkable. “Keep going,” Norman pleaded. “We made it back from Turin, remember.”
At one thousand feet they could see the white horses on the crests of the waves. Fifteen, perhaps twenty foot high. Tempest-tossed, Teddy thought.
By now they had jettisoned everything they could—the navigator’s table, cushions, flasks, oxygen bottles. Keith attacked the seats with the axe to break them up and Vic dismantled the mid-upper guns and threw them out of the aircraft, followed by the turret itself. Anything to keep them going that little bit longer. “Four miles to the English coast,” Mac reported, his voice as calm as ever. His papers and maps had flown all over the place when they had gone into the dive to evade the fighter and now he was gathering them all together as if he was shutting down an office for the weekend. It was one thing not to panic, Teddy thought, but another to have no sense of urgency. He recalled how, when they were trying to extricate Kenny from the rear-turret, Mac had stood back commenting while the others worked themselves into a frenzy.
“Keep going, skipper,” another voice said. At five hundred feet George Carr clamped the Morse key down, set the IFF on the international distress frequency and collected the dinghy wireless.
At four hundred feet the fuel gauges read zero. They opened the escape hatches and Teddy told everyone to assume ditching positions. Mac lay down in the starboard rest position, Norman on the port side, their feet braced against the front spar. The gunners had their backs to the rear spar and George and Keith sat between their legs. They all placed their hands behind their necks or rested them on their parachute packs to absorb the shock. Teddy had drilled them well.
They hit the water at 110 mph. The bomb-aimer’s compartment broke on impact and a huge wave of water and petrol swept
inside S-Sugar, immersing them up to their necks almost before they had time to inflate their Mae Wests. George had been knocked out on impact and they manhandled him awkwardly through the escape hatch. It turned out that Kenny couldn’t swim, and furthermore was terrified of water, and Mac had to secure him with one hand by the scruff and drag him through the water that had filled the fuselage while he thrashed about, squawking with fear. Teddy brought up the rear. A captain was always the last off the ship.
The dinghy that was stowed in the wing had been inflated and was now blocking the overhead escape hatch. S-Sugar was almost completely full of water and beginning to roll to port, and for a moment Teddy thought, This is it then, but then he kicked down into the water and swam through the gaping hole in the fuselage.
They all made it out and somehow or other they scrambled on to the dinghy. Norman cut the painter and they floated away from S-Sugar. She was still afloat, bobbing lopsidedly in the unforgiving grey, but within minutes she was sucked down and lost to the world for ever.
Somewhere out in the dark they could hear an engine. Mac grabbed for the Verey pistol and tried to fire off a cartridge but his fingers were so swollen and numb with cold that he couldn’t do it. How many hours had they been in the water? They had all lost track of time. This was their second night, they were all sure of that. It had quickly become apparent to them that the ditching was only the beginning of their problems. There had been a huge swell on the sea and no sooner had they successfully made it into the dinghy than they were all pitched back into the sea again by an enormous wave. At least the dinghy had stayed the right way up (small mercies), but it had taken a tremendous, almost superhuman effort for them all to clamber back in again, not to mention having to haul the insensate George back as well.
A God in Ruins Page 24
