Giving her a hand was the beginning, not just of a beautiful friendship, but of an odd courtship.
Why should it be more in the idiom of the times, Horner thought, to court your girl in the back row of the cinema or in the back seat of a jalopy if you were lucky enough to own one? Sitting astride the engine nacelles you learned a lot about one another, and everything he learned about Pip he liked, except her soft attitude to Maddox. That he didn’t like and couldn’t explain.
‘Girls prefer officers,’ Ginger told him, man to man, as he tried to sleek his scrubby red hair with palms full of Brylcreem before his date with Pam (a double date had been suggested but Pip had excused herself saying she had a headache). ‘I don’t say Pip does. But that’s the gen. Given the choice, officers win hands down.’
Satisfied with his hair, Ginger slipped on his well-brushed jacket. ‘And another thing. They prefer pilots to crew. So you’ve got two counts down to start off with. But chance your arm again! Ask her to the Sergeants’ Mess dance, eh?’
Horner had every intention of so doing when the time became ripe, and it became ripe the next day, after their air-to-air gunnery training. Maddox had got so close to the drogue the Henley was towing that he almost cut the rope with the port engine’s prop. Hair-raising.
That time, Ginger remained unmoved by the near-disaster because they had got so close he couldn’t miss with his guns, and got over a hundred hits on the target.
He went off to celebrate with Parachute Pam and Horner volunteered again to help work on the engines alongside Pip.
‘Congratulations!’ she said warmly as he rolled up his sleeves.
‘What for? Surviving?’
‘No, Jack!’ her smile faded. ‘You know what I mean. For getting the highest score. Your crew.’
‘Ginger, you mean. Ginger did it. Mind, we almost got the Henley as well. But that’s another story. And that would have been Maddox’s.’
‘Why don’t you like him, Jack?’
‘It’s his flying I don’t like, love. And come to that, why do you like him?’
‘He’s OK really. I reckon he’s lonely.’
She knew for sure that he was, because Pam, who had an ex-boyfriend in the orderly room, had discovered from Maddox’s file that his parents were dead, and his guardians were Lydgate and Green, Solicitors, and that he had spent the holidays in the headmaster’s house at some toffee-nosed school.
‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘I reckon he’ll get you through.’
‘Through the veil? To the next world?’
‘No, don’t be daft! Through ops.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s lucky. Someone up there.’ She raised her eyes shyly.
‘Getaway! Mind you, maybe someone up there doesn’t want him to join the angelic squadron. That’s a thought.’
‘But he is lucky, isn’t he? He gets away with things. My mother’s boyfriend…’ Strange, but that was the first time she had acknowledged the feckless Irishman aloud. ‘…says it’s better to be lucky than rich.’
Horner glanced across at her soberly. Then he lowered his eyes to tighten a bolt, and said with clumsy gallantry, ‘Well, he must be lucky. To be her boyfriend. Your mum’s.’
‘I don’t reckon he is.’ She shrugged. ‘No, forget I said that. It’s not fair.’
‘Do you get on well with your mum?’
‘I used to think I did,’ she said, and then her face seemed to close up. For an hour they worked in a silence broken only by the sound of metal on metal and Horner’s tuneless whistling.
‘That’s about it,’ she said, and stretched her grease-stained arms above her head.
Horner tossed his spanner into the toolbag and asked, ‘Care to come for a stroll?’
She began wiping the oil off her fingers with a rag, before glancing at him sideways. ‘What d’you mean by a stroll?’
‘A walk.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘but not too far.’
Then she slid down the wing and did the long jump to the ground.
And as they strolled along the dyke that edged the first of the Napoleonic canals, Horner judged it the right moment to try to invite her to the Sergeants’ Mess dance.
‘When?’ She was watching a skein of geese honking above them in the slowly darkening sky, her face glowing in the last horizontal rays of a crimson setting sun.
‘Next Saturday.’
‘I might,’ she said. ‘Or I might not. But thanks all the same.’
‘That’s a funny answer.’
‘I don’t like those sorts of do’s much. I’d rather be out here.’
‘Well, I’d like you to come,’ he said. That seemed to do the trick. She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.
Encouraged by that kiss, albeit a chaste one, Horner caught the Liberty bus the next morning into Hythe.
There were only two chemists in the town. In the first, a flashy blonde was at the counter. So he went to the Boots store on the corner. But there was a woman serving there, too.
So he went to Ye Olde Tea Shoppe for a cuppa while he thought about what to do.
Eventually he went back to the first chemist, hoping the blonde would have gone on her coffee break. No such luck – there she was still purveying toothpaste and cough mixture. But at Boots an elderly man was now on the counter. Horner told him what he wanted.
Disapprovingly he produced the packet of French letters and sanitised it by covering it decently in a plain paper bag before handing it over.
That Saturday Horner dressed with especial care. Clean shirt, clean pants, clean socks, buttons and shoes brushed bright.
‘Hu-hu,’ Ginger remarked, interrupting his own preparations to ask, ‘She said yes, did she?’
‘She said she might.’ Horner popped The Packet surreptitiously into his trouser pocket.
‘Might what?’ Ginger asked, and laughed.
The station band was blaring out as they arrived. Ominously the tune was ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’. Vera Lynn’s favourite tune.
They shoved their way to the Mess bar. The place reeked of sweat and scent and cigarette smoke. The floor was awash with beer. Straight away Ginger collected Pam from a gaggle of Waafs sitting in chairs against the wall, trying to talk animatedly to one another.
At first Horner thought Pip hadn’t come. He looked around anxiously. Then he spotted her on the floor dancing with her Geordie Maintenance Flight Sergeant.
The officers made their entrance, clearly thinking they were slumming – the CO, the SAdO, a couple of flight lieutenants and half a dozen sprog pilot officers, one of whom was Maddox.
It was a source of some irritation that the officers never invited the sergeants to their Mess do’s, but expected to come to the Sergeants’ without invitation. The WAAF CO, a round cottage loaf of a woman, who had been appointed because she was some air marshal’s sister, arrived with one of her admin subordinates and the spotty-faced junior Intelligence officer. The female MO followed reluctantly behind. They all tucked in like gannets to the sausage rolls and ham sandwiches, and drank deep of the meagre rations of spirits, encouraged by the sycophantic warrant officer chairman of the Sergeants’ Mess Committee.
The noise was terrific. If the Germans had bombed the station, no one would have heard them. There was a constant chorus of deep and shrill voices, the clatter of feet, the sound of breaking glass and ribald cheers and the band playing on.
Finally Pip managed to extricate herself from the embraces of her Flight Sergeant and came over to sit beside Horner.
‘Enjoying yourself, Pip?’
‘Yes. I think so.’ She patted his hand. ‘I am now.’
‘What are you drinking?’
‘I’d like a lemonade really,’ she said shyly. ‘I’m thirsty. I don’t really drink much.’
He bought her a gin and lime, and watched her sip it with apparent innocent enjoyment.
Suddenly she glanced across the room and said, ‘Look how he sits!’
‘Who?’
‘Peter.’ She pointed to where the clueless clot was sitting on his own.
‘So?’
‘Don’t you see? His right leg twisted round his left like the snake round the MO’s badge.’
‘So,’ Horner repeated. ‘Why shouldn’t he? After all, he is a snake.’
‘No, he’s not. You know he’s not. He’s ever so lonely.’
‘So am I.’
She pulled a derisive face.
‘He hasn’t any family.’
‘Neither have I. Not to speak of.’
‘Do you talk to him much?’
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I dunno. Just don’t want to.’
‘Has he any friends?’
‘How should I know? He’s in the Officers’ Mess.’ Horner was about to ask her to dance when a ladies’ excuse me was announced and abruptly she got up, walked across the floor and asked Maddox to dance.
An astonished smile spread across his face. He jumped eagerly to his feet, and then hesitantly put an arm round her.
It was a quickstep – ‘Don’t go out with college boys/ When you’re on the spree/Take good care of yourself/ You belong to me.’
It was pitiful to watch. He couldn’t dance. Had no rhythm. No balance. Being a cack-hander he didn’t know his left from his right. Clung to her shoulders like a drowning man. If he’d been a boxer, he’d have been disqualified for illegal holding.
When a breathless, somewhat discomfited Pip returned, Horner asked, ‘How are your toes?’
‘No worse than before.’
But she looked a little uncomfortable, worried even.
‘I nearly got the ref to separate you,’ Horner joked.
‘I’m not laughing,’ she said crossly. She felt deeply embarrassed. Maddox had held her so tight that she had felt something in his trousers the size of a hefty torch, which even her limited knowledge told her wasn’t a torch and wasn’t usually there, and was something vaguely threatening.
‘You didn’t enjoy it, did you?’ Horner grinned.
She didn’t answer.
The next dance was a waltz. ‘I’ll show you!’ Horner said, for the boys at Halton had been frequenters of the local Mecca Locarno Dance Hall and had learned a step or two.
She was as light as a feather, following his showy steps easily and gracefully, smiling. Now it was a gentlemen’s excuse me, and MacGregor tapped Horner on the shoulder and took her away.
Horner watched them, frowning. He got himself another Bass, and putting his hand in his pocket, felt the packet of French letters.
Time was getting on, so after MacGregor returned her, he downed the rest of his drink, and told her she looked hot and suggested, ‘How about a breath of fresh air?’
She gave him a funny sideways look, but didn’t say no.
Outside there were already a number of couples seeking the privacy of corners and crannies and air raid shelters.
There wasn’t much cover left. He propped her against the wall behind the ablutions and put his arms round her. She kissed very sweetly, but very innocently. A school-girl kiss. None of that tip of the tongue French kiss lark Ginger talked about. Horner was afraid to initiate it.
But he did let his hand rest on her thigh and then creep under her skirt. He felt the thick stockinette of black-outs, the heavy duty knickers the girls were issued with, not the unlawful silk and lace some of the naughtier girls wore. He rested his reconnoitring fingers momentarily on the top of her lisle stocking preparatory to crawling upwards through the tough barbed wire of her knicker leg elastic and over the top.
There came the statutory slap on the hand. But he let it rest in the position he had won in No-Man’s Land before deciding to move forward once more into enemy lines.
He had calculated they were only eighty yards from the room he shared with Ginger in the Sergeants’ Mess. He was just about to suggest it was cold out here, when suddenly there was a dazzling finger of yellow light that pierced the night like a miniature enemy searchlight.
There was an immediate and indignant howl of ‘Black-out!’ from the snoggers. It was totally ignored. The accusing searchlight flickered round them.
In the back beam was illuminated the WAAF Queen Bee, standing on top of the Mess steps now flanked by the burly bodyguard of her Waaf Flight Sergeant as she swept the darkness with her powerful torch.
‘The dance is now over!’ announced a stentorian voice. ‘All Waafs back to quarters!’
So that was that. The rumour circulating later was that the Orderly Officer had caught a Waaf and a sergeant in flagrante delicto in the broom cupboard, and so Ma’am had decided on an immediate clean-up. When Horner returned disconsolately to his room he found Ginger lying on his bed beside Pam with her skirt right up to her waist.
It was an unfair world.
‘You’ll get caught,’ he told them hopefully. ‘Then you’ll really be for it! Cavendish’ll have your guts for garters.’
But they weren’t. And Cavendish had other things on his mind.