A Pair of Silver Wings

by James Holland

‘I don’t think Jimmy’s happy,’ said Harry at last.

  ‘No,’ agreed Eric. ‘Can’t say I blame him, especially with Blackwood breathing down his neck. Sam had it pretty easy at Perranporth.’

  ‘What he lost in facilities, he gained in independence.’ Harry smiled ruefully.

  ‘Exactly. Sam was in charge of the whole show, wasn’t he? But Jimmy’s not the station commander at Portreath. That’s Blackwood’s job, and it’s pretty clear he doesn’t think much of the bigwigs handing over squadrons to twenty-one-year-olds, even if they’ve more experience than most people twice their age.’

  ‘I wish we had the old Jimmy back, though,’ sighed Harry. ‘He’s become too serious.’

  ‘It’s a big deal, though,’ said Eric. ‘It’s a big leap, isn’t it, from commanding a flight to being in charge of an entire squadron.’

  ‘He’s just fed up with the new Spits and Blackwood if you ask me,’ said Edward. ‘Can’t say I blame him.’

  Harry leant back in his chair and stretched – what can you do? – then said, ‘It’s winter. Everything seems worse in winter. Short days, grey skies.’

  ‘And the war’s going badly,’ added Eric. ‘Do you think there’ll ever be any good news?’

  ‘Tobruk’s been relieved,’ said Harry. ‘We haven’t been invaded.’

  ‘They won’t need to, the amount of ships they’re sinking in the Atlantic.’

  ‘Stop being so bloody gloomy. We’ll turn it around, you’ll see. Anyway, let’s talk about something else. Girls, for example. The dance on Saturday.’

  Eric laughed. ‘That’s what I like about you, Harry: your unflinching ability to see the best in everything.’

  ‘Well, there’s no point in letting things get to you.’

  Edward looked at him and smiled. He was so thankful to have had Harry by his side all this time. What good fortune it had been. Despite the disappointments of recent months, he knew he had much to thank the RAF for; for them to have stayed together this long was unusual, he knew. Other friends from Cambridge and Canada had been spread all over the country and beyond. And Eric was right about Harry: time and again his good humour and even temperament had been a source of comfort. Edward wondered how he would have survived those long weeks in Nova Scotia without Harry; he would have surely gone mad! He thought again about his friend as they drove back to Portreath later. He thought about how much he had come to depend upon him. Of course, he liked most of the others in the squadron – everyone got on well enough – but he could think of no-one in the world he would rather be with. They had spent so much time together since that providential meeting at Liverpool Street, knew so much about one another – foibles, habits, history – that he started to feeling maudlin about the inevitable day when they would be separated. At least, he thought, by staying in the squadron, they were kept together. It was no small consolation.

  But even Harry was beginning to find life humdrum, as he confessed to Edward later when they were back in their room at Portreath. ‘Maybe we should try and transfer too,’ he said. He was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘What, to PR?’

  ‘No. Oh, I don’t know. But I’m beginning to agree with you, Eddie. We need some excitement.’

  Another day with little prospect of flying. No convoys, and no enemy reconnaissance aircraft despite skies of wide open blue. At eleven, having been sitting in the crew room all morning, ‘B’ Flight were stood down. Rather than go back to the mess, however, Edward and Harry asked Jimmy whether they could take up the Spitfires. ‘A bit of local flying,’ said Harry. ‘Shame to stay stuck on the ground on a day like this.’

  ‘All right,’ said Jimmy, returning to the paperwork on his desk. ‘But don’t be too long – I’m getting flak about using too much fuel.’

  The long leg of Cornwall spread away beneath them as they climbed through the clear winter sky. The sea twinkled before them like a burnished carpet. Edward glanced over at Harry, some fifty yards off his starboard wing, and waved, then peeled off and dived. An idea had come to him; he hoped Harry was following and glancing back, grinned with satisfaction to see the other Spitfire behind him. The coast slipped beneath them and they headed out over the sea.

  Harry’s voice came through Edward’s headset. ‘Um, this isn’t very local, Eddie.’

  ‘Well, perhaps a bit further than normal,’ he replied, and looked at his altimeter. Three thousand and still losing height.

  ‘Eddie, where are we heading?’

  ‘We both need some excitement. I thought we could go over to France and give the Germans a bit of a dust-down.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Even through the static, Edward heard the incredulity – alarm even – in Harry’s voice.

  ‘We’ll go under radar. It happened all the time during the Battle of Brit. Come on, we can show them what we can do.’

  Silence, then Harry said, ‘You lead. Over.’

  Edward took them down to just a hundred feet above water, the glistening sea sweeping beneath them. His heart was pumping in his chest, but he felt exhilarated. He’d not planned this; not woken that morning with thoughts of a flight to France. But as they’d climbed high over south-west England, he’d remembered Sam and Jimmy talking about following 109s all the way back over the Channel. On one occasion, Jimmy had caught up with his Messerschmitt, and seen it disappear into the sea just half a mile from the enemy coast. He’d thought – to hell with it, I’m here now, might as well give them something to remember me by. And so he’d cleared the coast, spotted an airfield and shot up everything he could see, and hedgehopped back to the Channel again. That had been in the Pas de Calais, and the surprise of seeing a Spitfire swooping low over the French countryside had caught the Germans completely off guard. As Cornwall had shimmered emerald green that morning, it had occurred to Edward that the Germans would be even more surprised to see two Spitfires over the Brittany peninsula: they weren’t supposed to have the range. And of course, normally they wouldn’t, but with their new auxiliary tanks – well, that put a different complexion on things. Edward grinned to himself. It wouldn’t take long. Twenty-five minutes there, ten minutes over France, back at Portreath in under two hours.

  Edward took a deep breath as the French coast loomed. He’d not been to France before, but the Brittany cliffs looked just like those of Cornwall, and for the briefest of moments he had to check himself that they hadn’t flown in a huge circle. But no, a glance at his compass confirmed they were in the right place. The coast now hurtled towards them and they roared over land at just fifty feet above the ground. Edward glanced over at Harry, still hugging his starboard wing, and waved. He took another deep breath. Below, brown cows began stampeding in a field; a man on a bicycle stopped and looked up as they thundered overhead. We’re over France! he thought. Below were the enemy, and they were flying over them in broad daylight; but Edward felt empowered, invincible. He scanned the countryside, climbing for a better look, then spotted an airfield away to the east, just as he’d hoped they would. He waved again at Harry, pointing, then banked, the horizon swivelling, before straightening once more. The criss-cross of laid runways shone vividly in the sun, but dotted around the airfield were a number of aircraft, bombers, and, it seemed, fighters too. They were actually there; real enemy aircraft, with black crosses on the wings and along their fuselages. He breathed in and out rapidly, switched the gun safety catch, and with his thumb hovering over the gun button said, out loud, ‘OK, here goes.’

  He opened fire too early, the airframe shuddering as the eight machine guns drummed out bullets; he could see tracer initially falling short of the airfield. A moment later, he was over a line of aircraft, bullets still pouring from his wings. Men below were running. An explosion to his right – Harry had hit something. Was that an aircraft? Just a few seconds was all it took, and then they were over open fields once more. Edward looked behind him, thick smoke already erupting into the sky. Complete surprise! He grinned at Harry, who
signalled back towards the coast. All right, Edward nodded, but then saw a column of army trucks winding its way along a country road. Circling, he lined up behind them and as he opened fire once more watched with delight as grey-clad men flung themselves out of the vehicles and jumped for their lives. One truck ran off the road. Pricks of dust spat into the air where his bullets hit. It was hard to keep his line of fire perfectly straight, but enough had hit their target – he could see that clearly enough. Once past the column, he banked again, away over a wood, saw that Harry was still following close behind, and headed for the coast. Edward laughed out loud, and seeing a French farm below and farm workers in the yard, waggled his wings, whooping with joy as he did so. He sighed with satisfaction. Never had he felt so alive. The sea stretched ahead of them. How easy it had been – those Germans had hardly known what had hit them!

  Edward was still congratulating himself as puffs of anti-aircraft fire begun bursting around him, and arcs of tracer streamed into the sky. Shit, he thought, as his plane jolted and lurched. Twin lines of purple tracer were arcing slowly towards him, only to accelerate over his port wing. Another burst of flak – this time uncomfortably close, and the stick was jolted momentarily from his hand. He turned and twisted his aircraft and then he was back over the coast once more. Edward breathed a deep sigh of relief, but as he did so heard a huge crack, saw the horizon swivel, and smelled the acrid stench of cordite fill his cockpit. Clutching the stick, he managed to correct himself, but the controls felt lopsided, pulling to his left. Then he noticed the gaping hole the size of a football in his starboard wing. Jesus Christ! he cursed. Where’s Harry? He frantically turned his head – nothing. Come on Harry, where are you? He turned his head again, felt the straps of his harness cut into his shoulders, but there was still no sign of him. Cold sweat trickled down the side of his face. His heart hammered. Come on Harry, where the hell are you? A roar of power, and the other Spitfire suddenly loomed up beside him from under his port wing. Harry – thank God. Where did you come from?

  Out over the Channel, the sense of exhilaration returned, despite the strain of holding the control column to the right to correct the yaw from the hole in the wing; in all other respects, his Spitfire was flying perfectly, gauges all correct. As they drew closer to the Cornish coast they climbed steadily, passing over the glove of the Falmouth estuary at some three thousand feet. Several fishing boats were heading for port, tiny dots on a placid deep blue sea. Away to his left, the Helford river twinkled in the winter sunlight, silvery bright amidst the patchwork of green. A mass of cumulus rushed towards him, briefly enveloped his plane, then dispersed. These few clouds bathed the ground below in dark shadow. And there was Portreath, spread out below on the lip of the north Cornish coast.

  Hewitson and Parker were agog. Where had they been? Why were the canvas patches over the gun ports blown? What had he done to his wing? ‘Ah, sorry about that,’ Edward told them. ‘A bit of flak coming back over the French coast.’

  ‘French coast, sir?’

  ‘Yes, we shot up a German airfield.’ But he found his feigned casualness impossible to keep up; grinning helplessly, he left his speechless ground crew and bounded over towards Harry.

  ‘You madman!’ laughed Harry.

  ‘Well, we showed them, didn’t we? How many planes do you think we knocked out? I must have hit at least half a dozen, and something you hit exploded all right.’

  ‘A bowser, I think. I don’t know, but they certainly weren’t expecting it, were they? How’s your wing?’

  ‘All right – bit of a hole but nothing that can’t be fixed.’

  ‘I hate to think what Jimmy’s going to say.’

  Edward had not given any thought to that. In the excitement, it simply hadn’t occurred to him. ‘He’ll be all right, I’m sure. Especially if it’s confirmed we knocked out some enemy planes and army trucks.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Harry sounded doubtful.

  They were summoned into Jimmy’s office almost the moment they walked into the crew room. The other pilots crowded around them, anxious to know what they’d been doing, but Scotty tapped them on the shoulder. ‘CO wants you next door, now,’ he said, looking grave.

  Jimmy was leaning on his desk, hands clenched together. ‘Just what the hell do you think you’ve been doing?’

  ‘We flew over to Brittany,’ Edward told him.

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Shot up an airfield and some trucks,’ added Harry. ‘Surprised them completely.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Jimmy, running his hands through his hair. ‘It’s time you bloody grew up a bit, both of you. We’re fighting a war here, not trying to keep you personally entertained. So you’re a bit fed up with convoy patrols – so fucking what? So’s everybody, but it’s not up to you to go spraying bullets all over France just because you want some fucking excitement. What if you’d been shot down? All this time, all the training you’ve been through, and you go and get killed on some hair-brain free flight over Brittany? Jesus! You could be court-martialled for this. Christ, I could sack you both here and now. As it is, you’re both grounded until I say otherwise.’ He was silent for a moment, then added, ‘You know, I expected better from both of you. It’s a hard enough job being CO here as it is, without you two making my life even more difficult. I knew you were headstrong – you especially, Eddie – but I had thought I could trust you. Now get out, keep out of my way for a few days, and you both better hope no-one else finds out about this.’

  As it turned out, Jimmy later received a call of congratulations from group headquarters. Turned out a signal had been intercepted in which the Germans had reported five aircraft written off and a further four damaged. Not that either Edward or Harry knew for quite some days; as Jimmy later admitted, he wanted them to suffer for their crimes.

  The bad weather returned, and the pilots found themselves spending even more of their time in the dank crew room, huddled around the fire, losing money at cards and wondering whether they would ever be posted to somewhere more interesting.

  PART II

  Malta

  Somerset – June, 1995

  The weather had turned, summer seemingly forgotten. The horse chestnuts outside Edward’s close drooped, the leaves heavy with dripping rain. The first two games of cricket after his return from Cornwall had been cancelled and he found himself more housebound than he’d have liked. And restless, too. He’d enjoyed his trip to Cornwall – more than he’d thought he would. Admitting this to himself had been hard, but once he’d accepted the fact, he felt it was quite all right to look through his metal tin once again, to reread his logbook, and even to take a book about the Battle of Britain out of the small library in the town.

  The disrupted nights continued, however. He had told himself that revisiting his old Cornish haunts would put his mind at rest, but he’d known that that wouldn’t be the case. How could it? Nothing had really happened there; nothing worth keeping buried for fifty years, at any rate. But the memories had flooded back – there was so much that he’d thought had been forgotten. It had been strange, though, to come face to face with his younger self, a person he knew he had once been, but whom he now barely recognised. That flight to Brittany was a case in point. What had he been thinking? So reckless; and selfish too – he could have made things very awkward for Jimmy. He chuckled. Ah well, no real harm done. And then he laughed again, thinking what some of his old colleagues at Myddleton would have said if they’d been told the story. They’d never have believed it. Old Icy Enderby? Never! You’re pulling my leg!

  Several times he dug out Andrew Fisher’s address. Once he even began writing a letter but screwed it up and threw it away. You’re not ready, he told himself. On this matter, he was being truthful. He wished he still had a picture of Harry. There had been a number, and he remembered one taken on the cliffs at Perranporth; they’d been collecting seagulls’ eggs and one of the others had taken a photograph of them grinning triumphantly, each holding up an egg be
tween their fingers. He’d taken a number himself, but they’d long since gone.

  But if Edward thought hard, an image of Harry reappeared from the deep recesses of his mind – a little blurred perhaps, but quite definitely the friend he’d once known: Harry’s had been a gentle face, deep brown eyes and eyebrows. Never any blemishes – no pimples or rash from shaving daily – as he did meticulously, even on Malta. ‘I need to,’ he’d once told Edward. ‘A couple of days and I look like I’ve almost a beard.’ In his mind’s eye, Edward pictured him smiling: Harry had always smiled a lot; he was a happy person, always looking on the bright side, even when things had been desperate – as they frequently had during those dark months of 1942. Everyone liked Harry – he was impossible not to like. There were better pilots than him – or rather, better fighter pilots; Harry lacked the killer instinct.

  And what about his voice? Edward closed his eyes, leant his head against the back of his armchair and thought for a moment. A soft voice, unhurried. As a boy and a young man, Edward had always gabbled – especially when he was excited, when he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. ‘Slow down and start again,’ had been an oft-repeated phrase of his parents. Not at all like Harry, who’d always been so laid back. By God, but he’d been a good influence, and a good friend. Of course, Edward had known they wouldn’t stick together forever – that could never happen, but if Harry had been an invaluable friend throughout their training and time with 324 Squadron, then he had been a rock on Malta. Edward sighed. He wondered what would have happened if Harry hadn’t been there with him. Wondered whether he’d still be alive today, half a century on. He doubted it somehow. ‘Where are you now, Harry?’ he muttered, and felt his throat contract and his heart throb. And so that was why he couldn’t write to Andrew Fisher now. He wouldn’t be giving the whole picture, the complete story.

  He’d known it ever since he set off for Cornwall, but only now, in the first week of June, did Edward finally accept the moment was almost upon him; it was time for him to go back to Malta. There had been ghosts in Cornwall, yes, but it was not memories from those days that were ruining his nights. No, the images that made him writhe and sweat in his bed were from later – from that tiny Mediterranean island. And from Italy. Only the night before he’d dreamed of coming into land with Messerschmitts firing at him from every direction. The undercarriage of his plane had buckled on impact, the aircraft screeching and tearing down the dusty runway. Then there had been flames, burning his legs and hands, and he’d been screaming, watching them melt before his eyes; but before his final moment came, he had suddenly become an observer, watching from the outside as a pilot squealed from within a burning cockpit. That was Malta, all right, and that was the image of the place seared into his mind: a hellhole. But of course, it wasn’t a hellhole any more – not in that way at any rate – and this was why he felt certain that going there now was his only chance of banishing these fiends that plagued him. He remembered a line his mother used to say whenever he was ill as a child and the mercury in the thermometer continued to rise: ‘You have to feel worse before you can get better.’ He could picture her saying it, hovering in front of him with a teaspoon full of disgusting medicine. How true that was.