‘What are you lot on?’
We shuffled. Aircrew-sergeant’s stripes, to a ground-crew WO, are as thin as the toilet paper they’re printed on. And it was unusual for an aircrew to go out to a Wimpey, the morning after an op. The ground-crew think they own the bloody crates; they only lend them to us for ops, and they even make us feel guilty when we bend them.
‘Waiting for our skipper,’ said Kit humbly. ‘He’s giving us a lift.’
‘You lot get in our hair,’ grumbled the WO. ‘We’ve got a lot to do, you know.’ He kept looking at us; he wasn’t going to go away. He could sense the excitement bubbling up inside us; suspected some sort of practical joke.
‘Flight-lieutenant Townsend’s lot, are you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kit, so quiet you could hardly hear him.
Dadda emerged down the ladder, in a rush occasioned by the respect we all have for the effects of burning petrol. He spotted the WO instantly, and walked across, long-boned and relaxed. He was smoking a fresh fag; tipped the ash on to the WO’s shining toecaps, as if he wanted him to notice. The WO backed off, surreptitiously wiping each ash-covered toecap in turn on the back of the other trouser leg.
‘You shouldn’t be smoking aboard an aircraft, sir,’ he said, half cringing, half bad-tempered. Still uneasy.
‘I shouldn’t be alive at all,’ said Dadda. A bit of the old aircrew boast, putting ground-crew in its proper place. ‘Sorry. One forgets about the smoking. C’mon, gang, let’s go and find some ham-and-eggs.’ He opened the door of the thirty-hundredweight so casually that I wondered whether he’d lost his nerve and scrubbed the whole thing. We turned, to pile in the back.
Behind us, the WO called out, ‘Hey!’ Softly, to himself.
We swung round, and saw the leaping red flicker in the Wimpey’s cockpit. Saw the first bit of fabric crinkle and blister and peel back from the airframe. Saw the first red serpent of flame lick its way upwards, eating into the mist overhead.
‘Hey!’ the WO shouted again, and began to run towards S-Sugar. But doped fabric burns fast. Halfway there he changed his mind and stood stupidly, shielding his face with his hand against the heat. A few more seconds and the whole front end of the crate was going up.
People came running from all directions; it seemed like everybody on the whole airfield. In the distance, the warning sound of ambulance and fire engine. But some way off the fire engine stalled; they said afterwards the plugs oiled up . . .
Everyone stood and gaped. Especially when the voice started. The German voice, right here in the middle of an English airfield. Leutnant Dieter Gehlen, having his last fine careless rapture. And he might have claimed his last victims then, because several erks made crazy attempts at rescue. But the Wimpey was too far gone, aflame from nose to tail. And the voice grew so loud, it echoed round the mist-filled airfield; more than human, essentially the voice from a radio, distorted and full of static crackle.
‘Bullfinch Three to Bullfinch . . . port wing on fire. Get the hatch open, Meissner . . .’
They backed away as the crate turned into a torch in which nothing human could have lived. Yet the voice still grew louder and louder.
‘Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!’
Then the screaming; terrible, familiar.
‘What is it?’ shouted the WO, to no one in particular. ‘My God, what is it?’
An aircraft’s fabric doesn’t take long to burn through. Within another minute, S-Sugar was a blackened skeleton, filled with black blobs. There was no big bang. The front guns fired two rounds as the heat reached them; then the four guns in the tail – fortunately aimed only at the earth bank of the dispersal-pan – got off a long burst all on their own. There were individual flame-ups of flares and glycol; then, for a short time, the near-empty petrol tanks kept us lively.
And still the German voice bellowed on, out of the blackened skeleton. The ghost of Dieter Gehlen, born in flame, was consumed in flame. If the life of a happy man flickers like a candle for seventy years and gutters out, the short life of Dieter Gehlen burned out like a rocket. All that assembled crowd, the aircrew especially, knew then what had done for Blackham and Reaper and Edwards. But I don’t think that ground-crew WO knows to this day.
At last, silence. He was gone. All that guts, all that energy, all that faith in an evil, unworthy cause. All that hatred of the Britische Terrorflieger. I like to think he baled out before the bitter end, and landed at the Pearly Gates, and got a halo for mistaken effort. But I doubt it.
‘They shouldn’t have laughed at him,’ said Dadda softly, to himself. ‘They shouldn’t have laughed at him.’
At this point old Groupie turned up in his jeep. He asked a few questions, didn’t bother waiting for the answers and had our whole crew placed under close arrest. There was a sort of low rumble from the assembled aircrews that suggested, even to Groupie, that he hadn’t particularly improved the shining hour.
We were questioned closely. Dadda admitted to lighting a fresh fag from a dog-end inside the crate, and maybe being a bit careless when he disposed of the dog-end. But there was too much flak flying round the station for Groupie not to know that something was up. Over the next twelve hours we were frantically marched here and there, which was a bit rough, though nothing like as bad as doing an op. Especially as every time we went out, we got more cheers than the last time. And we heard that Groupie was having the same experience, only with boos and catcalls.
Then Groupie brought in all kinds of guys to ask us questions; the coldest-smiling top brass RAF police I’d ever seen. If they’re that terrifying, why aren’t they out in North Africa, scaring the Germans? There were also technical experts, pretty in well-pressed blues, and a couple of civvies who I think were trick-cyclists. We stuck to our story: nothing. Dadda stuck to his fag-end. We spent a lot of time reading old comics and polishing kit that hadn’t been polished since we got there. Meanwhile, the cheering and jeering got worse, and the adjutant ill-advisedly uttered the word ‘mutiny’.
Groupie had us in one last time, late that night, and began going on about LMF. Dadda looked at him in a way even Groupie found hard to take. They went on staring and staring at each other till the WAAF stenographer dropped her pencil. Then Dadda offered to prove that his crew did not lack moral fibre. In the morning, he said, we would do a solo raid up the Pas de Calais, strafing gun-sites from zero feet. If Groupie would care to accompany us, he would have the chance to observe personally if the crew of C-Charlie lacked moral fibre. It would have been pure suicide, of course. But as Groupie fixed his gimlet eyes on each of us, we gazed right back and nodded in turn. I even managed to stop myself swallowing.
We had Groupie over a barrel. He hadn’t been expecting this. And too many people were there to hear our offer, including the WAAF, whose eyes were standing out like chapel hat-pegs. Threaten as he might, news of it would be all over the base by morning. Mind you, I wouldn’t want to do Groupie an injustice. He’d have come up the Pas de Calais with us, if it would have done the war effort any good. But I think he saw then that we were another kind of problem. He rubbed out LMF after our names, and put in Crazy instead. The Crazies do exist; we’d met them. There was one air engineer I came across in London on leave who’d done four tours in Lancs. He would lie on his bed and try to trim his toenails with a .38 revolver. Crazies are hooked on destruction. They’re clean over the horizon, and never coming back.
Groupie went off into his private sanctum and closed the door and got on the blower, to somebody you could tell didn’t welcome being woken up. Maybe it was Butcher Harris on his bath night. They say old Butcher plays with bombs in his bath, like admirals play with boats. We couldn’t even hear Groupie’s end of the conversation properly, but the tone was ‘How the hell do I get out of this one?’ Then Butcher, or whoever it was, had a bright idea. You could tell that from the sudden change in Groupie’s tone. A moment later he came out and told Dadda to take his crew and every last bit of
their kit and possessions, and load them into C-Charlie and depart at crack of dawn. Dadda asked what about C-Charlie’s overdue engine-overhaul? Dadda was told where he could stuff C-Charlie’s overhaul. Or rather, it would be done after arrival at the new station. The expression on Groupie’s face implied he wouldn’t break his heart if C-Charlie crashed on the way.
Dadda asked where he was to fly us to. Groupie told him St Mawgan, in Cornwall.
‘Long-range attack on Tokyo via Mexico City,’ muttered Kit to me. Groupie froze him with a look, but said nothing. We were officially Crazies now, and no longer under his command. All he wanted was to see the back of us.
We reached our billet feeling slightly drunk, and began throwing stuff into our kitbags; throwing stuff at each other. Billy proved what a rotten shot he really was by heaving a boot through the window. We all thought that was an excellent idea, and joined in. When there were no barrack-room windows left (thank God it was only September) and no mirror either (we’d all have liked seven years’ bad luck, after months of the prospect of less than seven hours), we sat on our beds and talked.
‘What’s St Mawgan?’ asked Paul, taking a breather from working out how to get his motorbike inside C-Charlie.
‘Probably missions of an extra-hazardous nature,’ said Matt solemnly, and hiccuped.
‘Like delivering milk to the Tirpitz and picking up the empties,’ said Kit.
Just then we heard the thirty-hundredweight pull up outside. We loaded up, including the motorbike. It was starting to get light and we espied an RAF policeman leading a dog on a bit of string towards the small-arms firing range. It was a little runt of an Alsatian thing, with ears that were still floppy. We all knew where it was going, and so did the dog. Its head was down and its tail drooped. Aircrew aren’t supposed to keep pets, but they do. They ask their mates to take them over, if they get the chop. But if their mates get the chop as well . . . The police were always taking dogs up to the firing range, with a shovel in the other hand. Anyway, Kit makes for this policeman with terrible speed, and we all take after him like the clappers. Including Dadda, who is quietly swearing to himself. The policeman pulls up, a look of amazement and then of acute distress on his face.
‘I don’t like you,’ says Kit. ‘I don’t like you at all. I would not wish to have your company. I would rather have the company of that dog.’
‘I’m only obeying orders,’ said the policeman, licking his lips.
‘So is Heinrich Himmler,’ says Kit, rather unreasonably I thought. I mean, Himmler gets far more overtime pay than an RAF policeman. Kit holds out his hand. ‘That’s my dog.’
‘Who says?’
‘We do,’ we all chorused. He looked from one to the other of us, bewildered. It’s rather fun being an official Crazy.
‘Give him the dog, Corporal,’ says Dadda, very crisp and RAF.
‘Yessir,’ says the policeman, standing to attention with relief and giving a very fine salute. Oh to be a single-celled animal . . . We bundle back into the truck.
‘What you going to call him, Kit?’
‘Dieter. Leutnant Dieter Ernst Gehlen. But Dieter for short. He’s one of the crew now. He buys it, we all buy it. He lives, we all live. He flies. Every damned op. What the hell has he got to lose? If he wasn’t here with us, he’d be dead by now. Pure profit. He’s gained five minutes’ life already.’ He fondled Dieter’s ears affectionately, and Dieter licked his face with some enthusiasm. He’d lost his chop-list look already.
At precisely o-four-thirty-five hours, C-Charlie got clearance for take-off. With a bomb load of fifteen kitbags, one BSA motorbike and one happy dog. Nobody was supposed to know we were going, but a lot turned out to see us off.
Dadda flew down to St Mawgan at a very moderate height and a very moderate speed. I don’t think he wanted to risk straining the crate’s engines. It was funny, starting out with the sun coming up over our shoulders.
‘We’ve gone west at last,’ said Kit. ‘So this is heaven?’
‘Looks more like Slough,’ said Paul.
‘Not the Slough of Despond?’ Kit was in a daft mood. He had nothing to do; navigationally, it was a trip round the bay. We all gawped like trippers at a countryside of mist and hill, cornfields turning pink in the sunrise, with reaping machines and hay carts left any-old-how overnight. A countryside we would never have to bomb; where early farmhands looked up at us once and pedalled on. Where we weren’t Terrorflieger.
Soon the pale blue of the Bristol Channel crawled over the horizon, to join the English Channel in sharpening the land to a pencil-point. Devon and Cornwall narrowed and narrowed; the sea gathered in as if, if not to welcome us, at least to look us over. The slice of atmosphere spilling into the Wimpey smelt cleanly of ocean and seaweed. We took a crafty look at St Mawgan from the air. It had the solid brick buildings of a permanent station; no more tents and Nissen huts. And even from up aloft you could see traces of RAF bullshit: whitewashed patterns of stone round a guardroom; what would be a flowerbed again in the spring. I turned up the RT, so Dadda could speak to the control-tower. Tower, a rich, fruity voice, finished up by saying, ‘You’ve chosen the right day to arrive. Mutton chops for lunch and the Saturday hop.’
Silence. We were all knocked silly by the idea of a regular Saturday hop. Saturday night was the Butcher’s favourite time for the Happy Valley, the Ruhr that is.
‘This place sounds like bloody Butlin’s,’ Kit blurted out.
‘Watch your tongue, Sergeant,’ said Dadda, more RAF than I’d ever heard him.
‘I heard that,’ said the fruity voice, not at all put out.
That Saturday hop was quite a thing. A sea of floral dresses; the smell of face powder and the swish of silk stockings. Not a bad band, either: three corporals and three LACs and a nice semi-professional touch, even if the music was a bit out of date; provincial. Most of us just sat and watched anyway, and breathed in the females, though Billy the Kid got involved with a red-haired WAAF with an amazing pair of Bristols. And Paul found a guy who owned a motorbike.
I just kept watching the faces. There were a lot of steady couples, staid, steady couples. Nobody living it up, kicking the place apart, or twitching. The aircrew looked hard-worked, but they had the ruddy look of fishermen or shepherds. Many were quite solid round the middle; if bombers make your guts screw up, the boredom of Coastal Command makes you nibble. They looked middle-aged; quite a number had balding heads. But none of them looked as if he was on the chop-list. It was so hot and flowery-smelling, I fell asleep twice. But I wouldn’t go to bed. I was too busy absorbing the possibility of having some sort of future.
And that’s the way it’s been, the last ten months. It’s not a soft life in Coastal. Try crawling out of your bed in a five a.m. blizzard and trying to keep your perspex frost-free with your heating-hose and fingernails. And our lot have lost three crews in ten months. We often wonder what happened to them. Maybe they met one of those Junkers that get into the north end of the bay; maybe they met a wind that read 120 knots on their API. But that’s the point: we have time to sit and wonder what happened to them, and that’s quite a luxury. We sometimes stay in the air for thirteen hours at a stretch with extra-load tanks, and that’s a lot of time to wonder, while you’re watching the radar screen for the tiny blip that means a U-boat schnorkelling.
Meanwhile, we too have turned into fishermen and shepherds. We’ve dropped plenty of depth-charges, of course, but as far as we know killed nowt but blossoming white circles of belly-up fish. We met a U-boat once, on the surface off the Skellig, when we were coming home with no depth-charges left. Paul exchanged a few words with it, and it left the scene of the crime rapidly. We weren’t all that bothered.
Otherwise, we see a lot of sunrises and sunsets from high up, and study the flight of birds. A storm-petrel came through the windscreen once, and wrapped itself round Dadda’s neck. Paul reckoned it had been trained by the Japs in kamika
ze tactics. We had it stuffed for the billet mantelpiece. And we fly round in big circles and little circles, just like herring-gulls, but a bloody sight colder. But when we leave a convoy and their Aldis winks ‘thank you’, we feel a bit warmer.
Everything says we’re going to finish the war here; the forgotten army. They’ve taken away Tinsel and the H2S. Dadda wouldn’t let them pinch Monica. They’ve covered our black paint with a lovely coat of Coastal white, with two black bands round the fuselage. And we haven’t burnt any more crates. Dieter is great; he’s not grown much, but he’s put on weight and got this glossy, all-black coat that makes him look a proper Nazi. Which is a laugh, because he’ll lie down for anybody to tickle his belly. He likes riding in the front gun-turret, slobbering over Paul with excitement. He flies every op; Coastal understand about mascots; they’re nearly all ex-bomber anyway.
Oh, and we’ve got this new game. Dadda disclosed that his family have a ruined castle and estate at a place in Eire called Castletownsend. We’re all going to live there after the war, as gamekeepers and illicit whiskey-distillers and things. He did a zero-feet raid on the Republic last month, to show us the castle from the air. The Irish authorities complained, but Dadda just told the Wingco he had an Irish passport. I don’t know if any of Dadda’s story is true, but it helps to pass the time.
Yes, we get a lot of time to think, in Coastal. Think about the old squadron; all new faces by now, nobody left who remembers the end of Dieter Gehlen. Think about all the English ex-schoolgirls filling bombs till their backs ache, all the German schoolgirls making shells. Think about the guts of German mothers in Hamburg, sheltering their kids with their own bodies from the fire-typhoon we started. Think about the craftsmen’s skill in a Rolls-Royce Merlin, and a German medieval cathedral. All those people with all that guts, and our top brass are just turning them all into one great big rubbish tip that’s slowly covering Europe. While we watch seagulls.
Spectral Shadows Page 6
