‘Red Leader down! Red Leader down —’

My voice screaming into the mask-microphone, then — it’s like a slamming punch, coming from behind — a 20mm shell has exploded on the dorsal armour-plate behind my head. My eardrums are deafened, my eyes misted, I’m choking into the oxygen mask — my brains pounded to jelly.

Lines of orange golf-balls float lazily past my canopy. They’re 20mm cannon-shells and can take my kite apart, like a kid ripping up a lolly-bag.

Kite — where did that nickname come from?

Now instinct and training take over. My foot kicks the rudder-bar though my dead brain has said nothing. I’m choking and the red mist before my eyes turns to black: straining in a tight turn as the G-forces press their giant hand. And I am alert to the screaming chatter in my earphones.

‘Break, Reg — he’s on your tail!’

‘I’m hit, engine gone.’

‘Linus, tail, coming in four o’clock.’

‘Red Leader down!’

The last is my own voice yelling again into the throat-mike, punching cold awareness into my brain. I’m half-rolling out, flinching as a dark shape flashes in front. A Focke-Wulf and it keeps on going, wreathed in flames and glycol. Linus screaming exultantly into the intercom.

‘Got the bugger — flamer — flamer!’

‘Red Leader —’

Me screaming again — suddenly the sky is clear of zooming black shapes and criss-cross orange-white tracer. Clear, the way it magically happens. And we’ve lost height, Jerry and us: hell, no dogfight lasts more than a minute.

My Tempest bucks, my tail ailerons waggle loose, a cannon-shell has scored across my starboard wing. The green-brown landscape below is rising quickly, specked with the black spots of war. And because I am tuned — keyed — to a super-alert, I see something …

There are two tiny cross-winged shapes below and, letting instinct drive, I kick the rudder-bar and tip my air craft steeply downward — steep enough for the G-forces to gather dark edges at my eyes. I can see the cross-shapes more clearly: the first has the blunt-ended wings and big-snouted engine of a Tempest and following close, a leaner, dark shape, the Focke-Wulf 190 — just about the meanest and best prop-fighter that Jerry has.

Red Leader is trailing black smoke — in trouble — but I can save him.

Do I want to? Jingo Brook was ready to break me this morning — brand me a coward — and this bloody death-ride was of his choosing. So why am I diving? I cannot hear him on the intercom so do not speak myself.

Closer, diving at an angle to intercept. The 190 is hard to catch unawares; those bubble canopies have great visibility and the pilot will be using it as he centres on Jingo. I squint through my own oil-smeared perspex — they are closer, nearly at ground level. The Tempest ducking and weaving, under good control, the chasing Focke-Wulf spurting that orange cannon-fire. Matter of time before he gets Jingo — has he got him?

The Tempest is shuddering, white glycol streaming out to mix with the black smoke. I swear he is scraping the tree-tops. More of the orange-spaced tracer, now the Tempest is hit hard as the cannon-shells punch deep. I should pull back, let Jingo die — let him know what it is really like!

The Focke-Wulf filling my sights, a red indicator light on my control panel, one good burst of ammo left. That will be enough. My hurt and disorientation are gone, my leather-gloved thumb on the firing button.

A moment — thumb hard —

Yellow cannon-shells emerge from either wing; the Focke-Wulf jerking up as stricken aircraft do, its canopy shattering. Ahead, the Tempest hits the ground, a wing folding as it slews sideways, scoring a deep black mark in the ground — and I’m too low — too low!

I’m hitting the ground —

A wrenching, horrible moment as I jerked awake in bed. A cold dark night and the sheets tangled around me — hell, what a dream — I felt myself shudder, pulling the bedsheets away as though unstrapping myself from the cockpit seat. So real. But the Tempest fighter-bomber is a World War Two ‘kite’ — his favourite expression.

My digital alarm-clock flickered to 3.15 a.m. Registering one hell of a bad dream. It was a dream. So why was I suddenly awake and disturbed? Lying back, pulling the sheets around — why should a dream about something that happened sixty years ago have shaken me?

‘Fair cow, those bloody dogfights were.’

That creaky familiar voice snapped me back into reality. ‘Dogfight,’ he’d say when I was a little kid, and I’d imagine winged dogs scrapping in the skies.

Grandad’s voice sounded in the dark room.

‘Cripes, I nearly got killed for Jingo Brook. But boy, I’ve told you that already.’

‘Yeah, you told me Grandad.’

I sat straighter in bed looking at the shadowed figure in the chair by the window. The long skinny figure, always slumped, outlined by the pale moonlight. I put out my hand to the bedside lamp, but I did not switch it on — because I could see him. The gleaming eyes and white bristly eyebrows, white moustache; raising one hand, two fingers missing from that famous last dogfight he used to talk about.

‘So I crashlanded and a few days later it was over.’

3.15 a.m., but somehow not strange to see his slumped skinny figure and hear his voice; not thinking about why he was here, his creaky words sounding clearly.

‘Over to you boy. Cripes, it’s chased me long enough.’

Suddenly this was not a dream — I was too awake and my hand went for the light-switch.

‘Grandad —’ I turned on the light.

I was alone in the room. The chair by the window was empty. Just the chair itself and that poster of the F-16 jet. I could fantasise over that, me, who’d just been up in supervised flights on a Cessna.

I liked flying — Grandad enlisted when he was eighteen — and when I was young, he had cracked on about that, although I could not remember a word of it now. He lived only a few hours’ drive away, but I hadn’t seen him for some months — quite a few months.

Okay, so was this dream some kind of guilt-trip? It was so real that it tingled in this normal room. Outside, Rasputin the Rooster made his first creaky crow. He always needed a couple to warm up.

I lay back in bed. Still that awful dream tingled, but my new-millennium mind was already rationalising. So, Rasputin working up to a full crow, I lay back and —

— and woke up, the lamp still on and dawnlight strong, yes and Rasputin’s serenade long finished. I blinked, the dawn, even the lit lamp were normal and I could sigh loudly.

Yeah. Some awful dream.

Breakfast was warm Weetbix with sliced banana. Coffee — Mum cannot make coffee. She’s in a long silk dragon-sewn robe from Thailand: bit loud for her tastes, but Dad bought it when they were on holiday there.

I thought about telling Mum about my dream, but didn’t. She’d always had a problem with Grandad, and more so after last Christmas. I decided not to tell her about my dream.

‘Did you sleep alright, Matt? You look awful.’

Yeah, Mum thanks. I woke up just after three and had a chat with Grandad. I just shrugged and made the coffee. Dad would be in the basement, checking his e-mail, he runs an internet DVD business. Mum rakes in respectable money as a tutor at the Polytech.

The phone rang — early for a phone call — but it meant Dad was off the computer.

We sat down and sipped our coffee; I got the usual compliment, then Dad came prancing out of the cellar in that awful green tracksuit of his that I’m going to burn one day.

Dad likes his coffee very hot and black. That morning, he didn’t even sip it, though, or try to eat his Weetbix. He waited till we were both seated, then spoke in a very flat voice.

‘Deidre, your father died last night. I’ve just had a phone call from the local cops. A heart attack in the ambulance, on the way to hospital.’

So he was dead. ‘Gone.’ Like a punch in the stomach. He was no longer here, meaning that the raspy creaking voice, those bristling white eyebrows and glinting eyes did not happen.

Mum said nothing, but it was all in the way she looked at her coffee. Dad taking her hand and she lifting the coffee to her lips with the other hand; one little swallow and she put it down again.

We had known it was a matter of time. Even though he’d ruined last Christmas by getting drunk and using the F-word too freely. Yes, and glancing around like he didn’t care — like he enjoyed causing trouble. In the long silence, Dad continued talking.

‘About three o’clock this morning. Just after.’

The clink of my spoon hitting the bowl. A last swallow of coffee goes down the wrong way. Coughing, leaning back in my chair. My parents looking at me with concern.

‘Matt, you alright?’ asked Dad.

‘What time?’ came my voice. ‘What time after three?’

Dad shrugged. Actual minutes and seconds were not important — and I’m sure to him, they weren’t. ‘Three o’clock the ambulance arrived — pronounced dead at 3.15, the doc said.’

My digital alarm stopped at 3.15 a.m. —

When Grandad spoke to me.