Break of Dark

by Robert Westall

  I’d never smelt a bomber the morning after a raid before. Normally, the ground-crew hose them out with disinfectant before we see them again. But this morning S-Sugar smelt as we had left her: petrol, cordite from the guns, a stronger kind of cordite from the German flak, the stench of vomit, the greater stench of the cold, black Elsan, the stink of sweaty socks and another smell that smells like the smell of blue funk. Only a burning Wimpey smells worse, when the crew’s still inside.

  It was dark, too. Thick dark. Not much pale yellow light showed through the smeared windscreen.

  The moment I began to move up the fuselage, I stopped. There was something alive in there. I always know when there’s something alive in a place. We have an old grey moggy which hangs round our barrack-room. She’s fond of lurking, invisible, among the grey blankets. I always know she’s there, somehow, but she always gives me a fright when she jumps out, purring. Now there was something in S-Sugar, and it wasn’t a moggy. Much bigger than a moggy. The hair rose on the back of my neck. I tingled all over.

  There was a murmur from beyond the rear of the cockpit. The wind was blowing a bit, rocking the Wimpey on her wheels and keening through struts and aerials, but the murmuring was louder than the keening, though half lost in it. It seemed to be coming from somewhere near the RT; softly, rhythmically. I strained to hear it, and the hair on my neck rose afresh. God, this couldn’t be happening.

  The murmuring was in German . . .

  ‘You have done well, Dieter. You have done very well. Nobody could have asked for more courage and loyalty than you have shown. Now you—’

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ Kit, coming up the ladder, bumped into my back. One look at my face silenced him. And Matt and Paul and Billy, as they ascended one by one. We all listened, painfully holding our breath.

  ‘It is time to go now, Dieter. It was terrible, dying, but now you are free. You have done your duty. Go now where there is no more Führer, no more British terror-flyers . . .’

  A ghost talking to itself. No, I just couldn’t believe it. My mind was giving way about once an hour these days; almost as regular as breathing.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, let’s get it over with,’ said Billy savagely from the back. Bravely, from the back, he began to push Paul and Matt and Kit and me up the fuselage. He mightn’t have been so keen, if he’d been in front. I tell you, I was fighting like hell to get back and out of there. Kit was giggling in my ear, wildly.

  But in spite of my struggles, I was pushed nearer and nearer the wrecked RT set. There was a too-dark shadow behind the set. I couldn’t quite see what it was, because Kit’s navigator’s curtain was in the way, but I knew damned well that that shadow wasn’t shadow, that that shadow shouldn’t be there. It looked . . . leathery. Like a crouched airman in leathers.

  Then, starting with a near-imperceptible motion, it rose and rose, and looked at us, with a dead-white face under a rounded leather flying-helmet.

  I shut my eyes and screamed again. My throat was already sore with screaming. A very solid hand reached out towards me, grabbed my arm.

  ‘Steady, Gary,’ said Dadda.

  He had been there almost since we landed, seven hours before. Just got debriefed, then went to his billet to fetch a couple of things and straight back into the stinking bowels of S-Sugar. He clutched the few things against his flying-jacket now, with one hand. A fair-sized black book, and what looked like a string of fat black beads, with a little black cross on one end. ‘Relics of Maynooth,’ he said, with a wry, weary grin.

  ‘I thought you’d be back,’ he added. ‘And that will be petrol in the whisky bottle, young Kit? I knew I didn’t have all that much time.’ Kit had the grace to gape.

  ‘Give me that bottle, Kit.’

  ‘I’m going to bloody do it!’ said Kit, very defiant.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Dadda. ‘I’m going to do it. I’m skipper.’ Kit was so shocked, he forgot to argue.

  Dadda turned and looked at the smashed RT set. ‘I’ve tried to persuade him to go.’ He sighed. ‘But he’s very young, and very proud, and very brave, and, sadly, very much in love with his beloved Führer. I don’t think I’ve done any good, with all my talking.’

  ‘Has he said anything?’ asked Billy, curious.

  ‘No,’ said Dadda. ‘Nothing at all. It’s been me doing all the talking. Now let me have one more go, like good lads. Get outside and wait for me. And stand well back.’ He began to kick and scrape together on the walkway the debris of the night: greaseproof paper from the corned beef sandwiches, discarded maps and navigational instructions, my own Morse-code pad. Then, thoughtfully, he unscrewed the whisky bottle and poured out the clear liquid.

  The sharp, dangerous smell of petrol filled our nostrils.

  We bundled out, suddenly chattering like schoolboys on Bonfire Night, full of a sick sense of a treat to come. There were a few erks cycling past through the thinning mist, and some ground-crew kicking their heels under A-Able in the next pan. That sobered us. There were more people about than we’d thought. We spotted Dadda’s old thirty-hundredweight parked to one side of the perimeter track, and hung about there. A ground-crew WO approached with steady ringing tread.

  ‘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 lou
d, 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 Lanes. 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.’