Spectral Shadows

by Robert Westall

  ‘You sure?’ Blackham’s voice, tense and very Yorkshire-tyke.

  ‘Sure I’m sure. See him burn!’

  Wild cheers from Blackham’s lot.

  Then a German voice. ‘Bullfinch Three to Bullfinch. Abandoning aircraft. Port wing on fire. Get the hatch open, Meissner! Meissner, get the hatch open. Ritter, help him!’

  We listened, appalled, as the Junkers continued to burn and continued to fly wildly across half the sky, somehow keeping pace with us, arching its beautiful parabolas of fire.

  ‘Meissner, Ritter! What’s holding you up? Are you dead?’

  The Junkers, by some trick of fate, was now flying almost level with us, almost parallel. So we saw the flames from the wing creep up the fuselage, and the cockpit-­canopy shrivel away under its licking. And the orange-­lit face of the pilot staring at us, out of the flames, aghast.

  Then the Junkers was gone, falling, falling.

  ‘Watch the rest of the sky,’ said Dadda automatically. But none of us could tear our eyes away from the Junkers below. Because that was when the flames must have reached him.

  He screamed. It should have been his death-­scream. But then the flames must have let go of him again, like a cat lets go a half-­dead mouse. We could hear him whimpering as the Junkers, incredibly – flying like a singed moth, a half-­swatted fly – climbed slowly back to our level.

  This time, he noticed us. Maybe he blamed us for all his troubles. He made a frenzied attempt to ram us, screaming, ‘Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’ At least I think it was that, among the bubblings from his burnt nose and mouth and lungs. He sounded more like a half-­slaughtered animal than a man; except nobody would ever do that kind of thing to an animal.

  Dadda, half-­paralysed for once by the approach of that terrible apparition, took evasive action just in time. The Junkers’ slipstream battered us down the sky; we felt his heat and smoke billowing in through every nook and cranny; and that awful smell, just a hint, or maybe I only imagined it. Over the intercom, Blackham’s lot were still laughing; laughing at him, laughing at us.

  ‘Burn, you bastard, burn!’

  Unbelievably, the Junkers began to overtake us again. Christ, he might blow up at any moment, wrapping us in a shroud of red-­hot gas that would be his fuel and his glycol and his ammo and his flesh. I pulled my chute to me and began clipping it on. We were always more afraid of fire than anything else, in those old cloth bombers. Especially of our own chutes catching fire, so that when we baled out we flared up like comets. He still kept after us. He was rambling in his mind, now. Calling on his radar-­controller one minute, his mother the next.

  ‘Mutti, Mutti.’ Telling his mother he didn’t have a left hand any more, that his charred fingers had broken off on the control-­column. Three times, in between the flames catching him, he gave his name, rank and number, clear as clear.

  ‘73794 Leutnant Gehlen, Dieter Ernst.’

  Once he cried, ‘My eyes, my eyes!’

  And all the time, in the background, Blackham’s lot were laughing. (I heard afterwards that Dadda told me three times to turn down the intercom, and I never even heard him.)

  He blew up at last, well below us and about a mile behind. Long trails of pink and white burning stuff shot in every direction, as if someone had set off a bundle of Guy Fawkes rockets. Then the sky was black, till the moon returned to our senses.

  ‘Get that intercom turned down, Gary. I’m tired of telling half Germany where I am.’

  ‘Yes, Dadda.’ We had been flying three minutes on a straight course, sending out radio-­signals clear as lighthouse beams. We were dead. Dadda went into the steepest dive I have even been in. We fell like a stone. I thought we would never pull out; I thought we were mortally hit, though I hadn’t heard a sound.

  We came home at zero feet, and, until we cleared the Belgian coast, on petrol-­guzzling full boost. Zero feet with Dadda meant just that; I saw at least three church steeples flick by overhead. It felt better that way. When you’re high up, you feel big as a haystack and slow as a cow. At zero feet, you feel powerful, like a crazy, souped-­up racing car. We were almost part of the ground. Smells of the earth wafted through the fuselage for a second, and were gone. You always get your share of the local atmosphere in a Wimpey. And the smells were a sort of sad comfort; the sharp tang as Dadda clipped the tips of a pine forest, then the rich smell of a pig farm. Once, enough to make you cry, the safe, warm smell from an early-­working Belgian bakery. We saw no more fighters; none saw us. Perhaps they were all chasing Blackham. Maybe there was still some justice in the world, ha-­ha. Two miles beyond the coast, a flak-­ship opened up on us with tracer; red and green balls, very pretty, very slow-­curving, then accelerating alarmingly. Here’s ours, I thought. Here we go to join Gehlen at the gates of hell. But they’d misjudged our range or speed. The tracers passed miles behind us.

  When we landed at Lower Oadby, S-­Sugar was already standing in her dispersal-­pen. And the debriefing hut was swamped with the noise of Blackham’s lot. You always get a horrible tot of RAF rum at debriefing; it smelt and sounded as if Blackham’s lot had joined the rum queue several times each. They had simply flown home, without taking any evasive action. Four times they’d been attacked by fighters, but, according to Blackham, they’d been ‘Waiting for the little bastards, just waiting for them.’ They were claiming two more kills, and were giving the little WAAF who was debriefing them a hell of a time.

  ‘Here’s a lovely lad’ll confirm one,’ said Blackham, grabbing both my cheeks between his fingers and thumbs. ‘He gave it to me, didn’t you, me lovely lad? Ah was going to nail thee, but now us is quits. When tha tell the young lady Ah roasted one o’ them bastards over a slow fire.’ I was sick all down his flying-­jacket; and I was never less sorry about anything in my life. I blundered out of the debriefing hut; the light and heat and the noise were like some Viking feast . . . I’d heard that all Yorkshire tykes were Vikings in the beginning.

  Dawn was just starting to break; the runways, the parked Wimpeys were like pencil-­scrawls on a lavatory wall; meaningless garbage. How ungrateful can you get? I thought. Dadda’s brought us home by a miracle, and I’m not even glad. Because tomorrow night, or the next, or the next, we shall be going back to do it all over again. Anyway, I wasn’t home on the airfield; I was still sitting in that burning cockpit with Gehlen. He had sounded about our age . . . I was back with Gehlen, over and over and over again. Life had stopped with Gehlen, like a faulty gramophone record that keeps the needle jumping back to the same place and repeating the same tune. Bugger the Germans and the British. There were just those who flew three miles high on a load of petrol and explosives, and those who didn’t. That was the real difference: those that flew and those that sent them.

  I realized the lads had gathered round me, silently, in their soft flying-­boots. We looked at each other, then looked away. Gehlen was in Matt’s eyes, in Kit’s, in Billy’s eyes that looked like burnt holes in a white sheet. We’d had it. We were on the chop list and we knew it, just as we’d been before Dadda arrived.

  ‘Let’s go and hunt up some ham-­and-­eggs,’ said Dadda. It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order. We piled listlessly into the thirty-­hundredweight, and he drove off, slowly.

  It was very quiet crossing the Fens; the trees were the faintest possible silhouettes, the sky was flushing a pale pink, nothing like Krefeld, and the birds were just starting to sing. We passed an old farmhand, who wobbled on his bike in our slipstream, but waved just the same. And, slowly, the miracle happened, as it had happened before. The birdsong began to seep into our minds, then the silhouettes of the trees; like water seeping into a leaky old boat. We were back in the here and now, in a beautiful little nowhere; content to be there, and not to think at all. Gehlen began to fade. Oh, he still came, played over and over again, but the birdsong and the trees diluted him. Slowly, gradually, he got weaker and weaker. Dadda didn’t hurry; he wasn’t doing twenty miles an hour: the th
irty-hundredweight bumped its springs over the uneven Fenland roads as gently as a cradle. Matt’s cocked-­up leg relaxed and slid slowly across the metal bed of the lorry. Paul sighed and wriggled his shoulders back and forward. Kit let his head bounce on his hand where it lay on the tailgate, obviously enjoying the feeling.

  Dadda had found the ham-­and-­eggs farm after a hairy forced landing in a Whitley in 1941. He had left his rear-gunner in charge of the wreck, and just walked into the farmhouse. I suppose the famous Dadda smile did the rest, though people would do anything for somebody in flying gear, in those days just after the Battle of Britain. You could sit and watch the farmer’s wife cutting slices of ham off the joint, which hung up on a beam when it wasn’t in use. If you had the energy, you could go out to the hen cree with the farmer’s kids, and push the hens off the nesting-­boxes and take your own personal eggs straight from the straw, still warm. There was never ham-­and-­eggs like Dadda’s ham-­and-eggs. The eggs didn’t turn to glue in your throat and the edges of the ham left the lining of your stomach alone. And after breakfast you could mooch round the farmyard, watching the milk squirt into the galvanized bucket as the farmer milked each cow by hand. Kick the horse manure and smell the pong coming off it. Or listen to the farmer’s wife getting aerated about the Ministry of Ag. and Fish. inspectors. Those farmers were so caught up in their little world, they never thought to ask about ours. Sometimes they asked us to lend a hand, cleaning out a byre. If we had nothing better to do. Because we had the day off, hadn’t we? The whole day off? they asked enviously.

  God bless their ignorance; it washed us clean.

  Before we left, I took a couple of leaves from a plant that grew in the garden. When you rubbed them between your finger and thumb, they gave off a minty, lemony smell. The farmer’s wife said a couple of leaves under your pillow helped you sleep. I went back to the billet with mine, and slept like a baby.

  Next raid, our flight was sent on a diversionary attack, on the docks at Lorient. For once, Lorient was a soft job, practically a milk-­run. Dadda took us in at zero feet all the way. Lucky it was a calm night; we still came back with a length of seaweed stuck on the cockpit-­canopy. But he got past the flak-­ships without a murmur, and under the German radar, and because we hadn’t got to waste time gaining height we arrived ahead of the bomber stream. We had Lorient to ourselves, dumped the bombs somewhere near the harbour and were on our way out before the flak opened up. Dadda for God!

  We went out to sea on the way home, to avoid the fighters; heading for St Mary’s in the Scillies, slowly climbing. Dawn found us still at sea; a lovely morning, the waves an engraving on the brazen glow behind us and sunlight streaming into the cockpit. It was a bit like sailing; I’d once spent a holiday on the Scillies.

  Just as we sighted St Mary’s, Billy said, ‘Junkers about three miles off, dead astern.’ And there it was, a little black thing shaped a bit like a tadpole. Such a little thing to spoil a lovely morning . . . But you don’t muck about with Junkers 88s, even in daylight. It could overhaul you no faster than a family car, but it had a much tighter turning-­circle than we did. Luckily, there was a great patch of cumulus just off St Mary’s, and Dadda put us straight into it.

  We flew around inside, waiting for the Junkers to need his breakfast. Trouble was, we had to keep turning, to avoid flying out of the cloud again. A certain brightening of the light gave us a bit of warning when to turn, but three times we pushed our nose out, which the wily old Junkers was expecting. But he couldn’t outguess Dadda. The first time we came out, the Junkers was miles below us; the second time, he was flying away from us, and the third, he was just crossing our bows. Mad Paul gave him a burst and he could hardly miss. Bits flew off Jerry’s port-­engine cowling and he sprouted a long white plume of glycol-­smoke. He knew what it was all about; headed straight for the French coast in a shallow dive. Their rear-­gunner even had the nerve to stick up two fingers at us. Paul stuck his right back. Paul wanted to chase him, but Dadda said we’d used up a week’s luck already and headed for home, mumbling some uncouth Gaelic ditty under his breath. The Junkers, now far behind, seemed to be roughly holding height; we wished him nothing worse than a ditching, and a pick-­up by RAF Rescue.

  We landed in high good humour, for once with a good story to tell. The other flight was back, from Osnabrück. S-Sugar was in its pan. We breezed into the debriefing room – and it was just like walking into the Arctic. They just didn’t want to know us at all.

  It took some time to get anyone to explain what had happened, but apparently a kid called Reaper had been landing after Osnabrück. Now Reaper had once seen some silly bugger overshoot a runway. The effect had been so awful that it had left Reaper with just one ambition in life: never to overshoot a runway himself. So Reaper had his flaps down quicker, his throttles back quicker, his brakes on faster than anybody ever known. They called him the Caterpillar, offered him spare lettuce leaves in the Mess.

  Anyway, there was old Caterpillar caterpillaring in when another Wimpey comes in to land straight over the top of him. Its slipstream knocked Caterpillar all over the shop, though luckily he was nearly stopped by then. Then the other Wimpey lands right in front of him, neatly enough, but totally blocking Caterpillar’s way to the dispersals. It was S-Sugar. Typical bloody Blackham. He’d even cut his engines. Caterpillar leapt out, apparently, and ran up to S-­Sugar like he was going to give Blackham the hiding of his life.

  But Groupie in his jeep beats him to it. Just as well. Because there’s something funny about S-­Sugar. Something odd. The escape-­hatches are open and missing, though there’s not a speck of damage anywhere on her. Groupie sent Caterpillar away, straight off. Groupie’s been flying thirty years; he’s got a nose for trouble. So somebody fires a flare to summon the ambulance. Then Groupie goes inside. And the first thing he finds is one dead rear-­gunner with a hole in his chest. Poor old Geranium. And there’s a thirty-­eight service revolver lying just beside him, with one cartridge fired. And not a single bullet-­hole in the fuselage . . .

  Blackham was one of the few men I knew who carried a revolver on raids, to help his escape if he got shot down.

  Of Coade, the front-­gunner, Spann, the wireless op, Brennan, the navigator, and Beales, the co-­pilot, there was no sign. Groupie umphed a bit at that. They thought Blackham was dead, too, at first. But he wasn’t. Just rigid; hands still on the wheel, feet still on the rudder-­bar. Staring ahead of him, as if he was still flying. He wouldn’t answer when they spoke to him, wouldn’t turn his head to look at them. In the end they had to prise his hands off the controls and carry him out on a stretcher. Catatonic schizophrenia, they said later, when he went on sitting and flying S-­Sugar in the hospital ward. He’s never said a word to anybody from that day to this. And late in the afternoon they phoned to say they’d found the four missing aircrew, buried in a large turnip field near Chelmsford. It seems they’d jumped from too low a height; their parachutes had had no time to open.

  Nobody was ever going to know exactly what happened to S-­Sugar on the journey home. Her bombs were gone, every single part of her worked to perfection, there wasn’t a bullet-hole or a scratch on her. No reason in this world for baling out. So they serviced her and put her back in her pan. Groupie said she could serve as a spare aircraft for any crew whose crate was undergoing repair.

  What they should have done was to throw her on to the scrap­heap, as we had once thrown away that Messerschmitt propeller-­blade. But no one – not even Butcher Harris himself – has the clout to write off a fairly new, totally undamaged plane. And people flew quite regularly – if not cheerfully; never cheerfully – in crates where men had died, where men had been scraped off the seats. But at least we knew what happened to them. Nobody knew what had happened in Blackham’s Wimpey.

  After that, S-­Sugar began to dominate the whole station, as the prop-­blade had dominated our barrack-­room. Nobody went near her. Shadows seemed to gather inside her cockpit and turrets. She grew to
twice the size of any Wimpey on the field. It was the time of the autumn spiders; they spun webs all over her, as they spun them in the hedgerows, as they spun them on the other Wimpeys. Except that flight and servicing and polishing scrubbed the other Wimpeys clean every day. The cobwebs just grew thicker on S-­Sugar. The ground-­crew sergeant had a strip torn off him by Groupie about it; he swore he cleaned Blackham’s Wimpey daily, but nobody believed him. Erks cycling past the pan at night were seen to steer away from it, in a half circle. There were all sorts of rumours in the erks’ mess too. Voices had been heard inside it, when there was no one about; crackly intercom voices. Then the WAAFs got hold of the story. Had anybody noticed, they asked, that no birds ever perched on Blackham’s Wimpey? Actually, very few birds perched on anybody’s Wimpey; they don’t make desirable perches, not with so many trees around – but that was the kind of stupid rumour that went around. Not that the aircrews were any better, though they never mentioned it. Aircrew are more superstitious than sailors. They all have mascots: teddy bears, old raggy dolls, umbrellas; won’t fly without them, or without peeing on the tail-­wheel before they go and after they come back. So it came out afterwards that people had gone to extraordinary lengths not to fly in Blackham’s crate. Pilots with defective crates didn’t report them, just slipped their ground-­crew fivers to work overtime on their personal planes, until they were fit to fly again. More than once there were unexplained fights between crews over job priorities.

  Finally, the scandal reached Groupie’s ears, and he put his foot down. With all the lack of sympathy that scrambled-­egg wallahs are capable of, he picked Reaper to fly S-­Sugar on the next op to Tallinn. Reaper’s crew immediately put themselves on the chop list. They sat in a tight little group at ops tea, silent, sweating, eyes down, not touching a scrap of their grub. They had spent two days writing letter after letter to say goodbye to their folks back home, giving away their tennis rackets and golf clubs and altering their wills. Nobody could bear to look at them. Most people expected them to crash on take-­off, and they damned nearly did.