CHAPTER 5

EVERY MORNING AT BREAKFAST the loudspeaker switched on. There was a click and a buzz, then the deep thump of a finger being tapped on a microphone somewhere. And then a voice came on—the lovely, whispery voice of an English WAAF. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she always said.

A silence filled the room with the first click from the speaker. Talking stopped, and eating stopped, and row after row of airmen became as still as photographs.

The WAAF cleared her throat. She always did, and I always imagined her fingers, thin and white, lifting up to touch her lips.

Everyone was listening, and no one moved. They never moved before she spoke again. Our whole days depended on the next thing she would tell us. I wanted her to say that we were “on” for the night. I was sick of being stood down day after day—more than a week since Lofty went flying. I wanted her to say that we were on, that I would be heading off to Germany.

I looked at little Ratty and saw he had his fingers crossed. Lofty was putting his hand in his pocket. Two tables away, Donny Lee’s head of clown-red hair was bent over his breakfast.

The WAAF, like an angel, said, “You are on for tonight.”

I cheered. I shook my hands in the air like a boxer; I shouted, “Hooray!”

I was the only one who did. Ratty was grinning, and Will had a thumb cocked up. Buzz and Simon and Pop all looked as happy as clams, but I was the only one in the whole room who cheered. Lofty took his hand from his pocket, and his pipe was in his fingers. He popped it in his mouth and smiled at us, but his new, dark eyes seemed hollow.

At every other table, all around the room, there was one long groan followed by a lot of muttered voices. There was a lot of staring, too, all aimed in my direction. Donny Lee went scurrying to the door like a guy with his hair on fire.

“Well, chaps,” said Lofty, “I’ll take a squint at the list. See if we’re flying.” He puffed on his empty pipe as he wandered away.

All around, plates were being pushed aside and breakfasts left unfinished. But we kept tucking in at ours, hoping that Buster was on the list, trying to guess where the night would take us. We were the only ones left in the room when Lofty appeared in the doorway again and told us, “Shake a leg, chaps. We’re on.”

The hours seemed endless. We flew circuits and bumps from ten to noon, ate a lunch and stooged around, then went in for briefing. It was my first time in the hut, and I felt like bounding across the benches to claim a seat at the front. But I forced myself to go slowly, swaggering instead, with my worn-looking cap pushed back, nodding hellos to people I didn’t know. I thought I looked like Billy Bishop, but a wave of titters came from behind me. I wanted to sink through the floor, until Lofty looked up and smiled to see me.

There was a stage at the front of the room, a row of chairs and a lectern, an enormous curtain at the back. More than a hundred airmen stamped to attention as the officers came in, then sat again with a squeal of benches and a shuffling of feet.

The CO stood at the lectern in his leather jacket and crushed cap, looking the way I had only tried to look. He made a joke that wasn’t funny. I laughed loudly, though no one else laughed at all. Then he pulled a cord, and the curtain slid open.

The room filled with voices and mutters. “Good God,” said a gunner. “It’s Happy Valley again.”

A pair of red ribbons started at Yorkshire and bent their way south, turning here and there, to end at Düsseldorf in the valley of the Ruhr. It didn’t look like a long way on the map. The ribbons passed over the North Sea, over Holland, then dodged into Germany with a sudden turn. “Piece of cake,” I told Lofty.

He didn’t answer.

We got the weather report from a white-haired meteorological officer, a little fellow so short that he might have been the eighth dwarf. The crews called him Drippy because he nearly always predicted rain. But tonight, he said, the skies would be mostly clear. He sniffed and sat down, and a parade of officers followed him. We got the news—the gen—on signals and timing and routing. Nearly eight hundred aircraft would be converging over Düsseldorf, so we had to be sure that we kept at the proper altitude and headings. The intelligence officer tapped a pointer on the map to show us where we’d meet the flak and searchlights. His stick went tappa-tappa-tappa across half the stupid map. I said, “Sir! You should tap where there isn’t flak.” Again, my laugh was the only sound.

I cringed inside myself, and didn’t look up until the briefing was finished. Then the pilots and the navigators swarmed toward the front, and gunners drifted off. I joined the mob of wireless operators lining up to collect a list of frequencies on a bit of paper called a flimsy.

I kept to myself until supper, then joined Buster’s crew in the dining hall. I could smell the eggs and bacon, and went drooling to my table. Only the operational crews got eggs; to me they were something like medals.

A WAAF brought one to me. In her little blue suit she leaned over my plate and served me from a spatula. “There you go, love,” she said.

I could hardly turn my eyes away; they nearly popped from my head. Right in front of me, beautiful and smooth, as white and soft as cream, was the first real egg I’d seen in more than a month. But my second would be waiting when we came back from Germany, so I ate this first one in two big bites. All around the tables people were joking about the eggs, asking each other, “If you get the chop, can I have yours at breakfast?”

We ate quickly, then collected our escape kits and our parachutes. We changed into flying clothes—into clobber, we called it. The gunners lined up to plug into the electricity and test their heating systems, and there was a smell of hot wires and scorched leather. Then the sun was going down, and we waited on the lawn for the truck to take us out to B for Buster.

Dirty Bert came along with his bomb trolley. It was stacked with pigeon boxes, and each of the metal crates had its end open, the round lid clipped to the side of the box. Inside, behind the flaps of the cardboard linings, the pigeons cooed and scratched. Bert doled them out to the “wops”—the wireless operators—so I got in line with the others.

The wops ahead of me took the boxes without a word, without even a nod to Bert. I tried to do the same, but he held the box too tightly. My hands slid right off it, and I staggered back, surprised. Then, head down, I went at him again.

“’Allo, sir,” said Bert.

I tugged at the box.

“I saved Gilbert for you, sir,” he said. “Gibby’s a fine little bird. I think you’ll like ’im, sir.”

The box still wouldn’t budge. Gilbert had his head so far through the hole that I was afraid he would peck me on the wrist. The guys behind me were muttering and pushing, trying to hurry me along. I looked up at Bert and saw the friendliest smile I had ever seen in the air force.

“You’ll watch ’im, won’t you, sir?”

“Yes,” I said. “All right, I will.”

“Good luck to you, sir.” He winked. “’Appy flying.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The box came easily then. I carried it away with my face red from the shame of talking to Bert. The pigeon clattered and cooed, until I was sure that everyone was staring at me. I shook the box and told the bird, “Shut up!” The more I shook, the more he squawked, the stupid thing.

I thought of shoving the box underneath a fuel bowser and telling Lofty, when he asked, “Gee, I didn’t see any pigeon.” But when the truck came to take us out to Buster, it was too late. Lofty shouted, “All aboard! Women and children and pigeons first.”

He was just showing off for the lady driver, who turned around in her WAAF cap and tittered at me as I held the pigeon, like a kid with a giant lunch box. “Don’t eat him, now,” she giggled. All the way across the field I thought of clever, withering things I should have told her.

Sergeant Piper was waiting under B for Buster, with his gang of erks around him. He greeted us in a way that was friendly and rude at the same time, with a wisecrack about sprogs. Then he stood at the tailgate, catching our elbows as we tumbled down. Gilbert fluttered and squawked as I leapt to the ground. “Careful with that, boy,” said Sergeant Piper, as though it was a bomb that I carried. He had a big wrench in his hand, so I only glared at him.

We carted our gear to Buster’s door. Everyone had a flask of coffee and a paper bag full of sandwiches and oranges and chocolate. We climbed in and lugged it all to our places. As I stepped down from the cockpit to the nose I squinted at the pipes and hoses and tried to see in them my phantom navigator.

There was no feel of ghosts. I knew the sense of haunted places: the witch’s house in Kakabeka; the gloomy meadow just above the falls, where an Indian princess had flung herself into the river. They were clammy places, even in the sunshine. Buster just felt empty, like any old machine.

I stowed my parachute away and strapped the pigeon box in place. As I reached inside to take out the food and water cans, the pigeon tried a breakout. “Get back,” I said, giving him a poke.

From up and down the kite came thuds and bangs as others stowed their things. We examined everything from the bombsight in the nose to Ratty’s twin guns in the tail, then went out to lie in the grass and wait.

The sun was nearly down, the moon not risen yet. The tiny blackflies—midges, the English called them— swarmed around in swirling clouds. Dew had settled on the grass. Ratty and the others who smoked got out their cigarettes and puffed circles at the sky. Buzz lay stretched on his side, digging with his fingers at the soil.

I couldn’t sit still. I tingled all over with the excitement of flying, and I sat up and lay down and sat up again.

Lofty and Pop went walking around Buster, tugging at the trimming tabs, patting at the wheels. Sergeant Piper went with them, his hands in his pockets, talking like a car salesman about every little thing. The three of them bent down to look at the tail wheel, and I saw a flash of silver at Pop’s throat. He was wearing a crucifix that I hadn’t seen before.

It was for luck, I thought. He wasn’t the only one who carried something with him. Little Ratty had a rabbit’s foot that he had brought from the States. He had hung it round his neck for his very first flight, on the Canadian prairies, in one of the canary-colored trainers we knew as Yellow Perils. He had never climbed into an aircraft without it. Will had a picture of a girl tucked in his helmet. We all knew she was his wife, and we all knew he kept her picture there, though he was always very secret about the way he slipped it into place before a flight. Simon, somewhere, had a white handkerchief that smelled very faintly of perfume. Buzz carried nothing with him, yet he never flew without a charm, and he was busy digging in the grass now to find one.

I had a ray gun. It was just a ring—a kid’s silly ring— such a stupid thing to carry that nobody knew I had it. It was buttoned in my tunic pocket, and it would stay there until I was alone in the darkness, bent over my desk where no one could watch me.

Only Lofty had no lucky charm, and no belief that he needed one. He had smiled at the stinky handkerchief, and chuckled at the rabbit’s foot, and he certainly would have howled at my ray-gun ring. It wasn’t stuff like that, he’d said, that had kept us alive through our training, while so many others had bought the farm. “You don’t need luck,” he’d told us. “You’ve got me.”

I patted my pocket. The ring was still there.

“Hey!” cried Buzz, suddenly sitting up. “I found one.” He held up his trophy, a tiny four-leafed clover.

Ratty applauded; Will made a wolf-call whistle. Buzz wedged the clover into his flying glove, up to the tip of his trigger finger. By the end of the flight it would be a green smudge, like a bug squashed on his skin.

We spent half an hour loafing around on the grass before Lofty signed the 700. Then we climbed aboard for another half hour of waiting in the kite. The sun had warmed the black metal, and Buster was oven-hot. I sweated in just my jacket and my trousers, and pitied the gunners bundled in their leather coveralls. At seventeen thousand feet their sweat would freeze into ice. So would Lofty’s. He was such a great guy that he kept the hot-air outlet aimed down toward me and Simon instead of at himself. I would always be warm.

Gilbert squawked. I rapped on the box, but he squawked even louder. Then Simon shouted at me, “Why’s that bird throwing a wobbly? If he doesn’t shut up, he’ll come a gutser.”

I didn’t know exactly what Simon meant, but it sounded awful. I banged on the box and told the pigeon to be quiet. It bashed around, then settled down. And through my window I watched the darkness close in. The other bombers stretched away in staggered rows. The closest one was E for Eagle, and I could see the pilot in his cockpit, a black dot against a sky that wasn’t much lighter. Sergeant Piper and the other erks stood around their trolley. They leaned back with their arms crossed, digging their toes at the grass. They looked bored and impatient, like people waiting too long for a bus.

Then at last we got the word. It started at Bomber Command in High Wycombe, filtered down to Group, down to the squadron, and at last to the airmen.

Lofty cleared his throat. “Right. Let’s get this bus in the air,” he said.