6
Except that on that night the worst was yet to come.
Something struck us explosively at the front of the plane. I felt the shock of the impact, was thrown against the wall of the aircraft by the blast and scorched by the sudden glare of white flame as it ballooned briefly down the fuselage. I fell to the floor as the plane tipped over.
‘That’s it! Bail out, everyone!’
I heard JL’s desperate words through the intercom, but they were followed by a dead silence on the earphones. The intercom lead had jerked out of its socket as I fell. I think I blacked out for a few seconds. Then I was back, in an agony of pain. Blood was running down over my eyes, gluing my eyelids. Something must have hit me in the leg, high up, close to the hip. When I put my hand down to see what damage there was, I could feel more blood all over my trousers and tunic. Freezing cold air was jetting in through a large hole in the floor, below and slightly to the side of my desk. All the lights were out. The engines were screaming and the angle of the plane’s dive was rolling me towards the front. My injured leg banged against something jagged that was sticking out from the floor and I yelled with pain.
Suddenly terrified that I alone had survived the explosion, that I was trapped inside the plane as it plunged towards the ground, I dragged myself from under the remains of my navigation table and pulled myself along the uneven floor of the fuselage. Because of the plane’s steep angle it was easier than it would otherwise have been, but I had to get past the large hole that had appeared in the floor. The broken spars of the plane’s geodetic hull jutted up sharply.
I had managed to squeeze past the hole when I heard the note of the engines change. They throttled back, under control, and I felt the downward pressure of G-force on me as the plane levelled out of its dive. I’d rolled forward so that I had fetched up against the back of the pilot’s seat. I hauled myself up and saw JL sitting there, silhouetted by the dim light from the instruments. He was at a crooked angle, but reaching forward with both hands to hold the control stick. The front of the aircraft had suffered great damage: most of the fuselage ahead of the cockpit had been blown apart. Freezing air battered in against us.
Seeing the difficulty he was having with the controls, I reached over and tried to help him by taking some of the weight of the column, but he brushed my hand aside. My intercom lead had followed me down the fuselage so I plugged it into the socket on the instrument panel.
I shouted, ‘Are you hurt, JL?’
‘No!’ His voice was high with tension. I glanced up at him, but his face was unreadable behind the oxygen mask and flying goggles. ‘Well, nothing serious. It got me in the gut,’ he said. ‘But I think it’s OK. More like a big punch than a wound. What about you? You’re covered in blood.’
‘Head wound. Something wrong with my leg.’
‘What about the others?’
‘I haven’t seen anyone else.’
‘I told everyone to bail out.’
‘I heard that. What about Ted Burrage? Or Lofty?’
‘I don’t know. Remind me of that course to get us home!’
‘Do you think we can make it?’
‘I’m going to have a damned good try!’
The plane was apparently responding to the controls, although there was extensive damage to the fuselage. Both engines were running OK, but JL said that the port engine was starting to overheat.
The shock of the explosion wiped all thoughts from my mind and I couldn’t remember the course I’d worked out. I crawled back to the remains of the nav cubicle, holding the emergency torch. By some miracle my pad was on the floor beside the hole, the pages fluttering stiffly in the gale. I grabbed it and hauled myself back to the cockpit. I read out the two courses and JL confirmed them. For a moment it felt as if we were flying normally.
By the time the plane was back on a more or less even keel we had long since crossed the German coast and were heading out over the North Sea. Our course no longer had to be exact, because once we were close to British air space there were direction-finding aids we could use. Getting lost was the least of our worries. Of greater concern was the condition of the port engine, which had obviously taken a hit somewhere. JL throttled it back to ease some of the strain, then a few minutes later he pulled it back a little more.
‘How long before we lose too much height?’ I shouted.
‘An hour maybe.’
‘Are we going to make it?’
‘What’s the distance to the coast?’
‘More than a hundred miles.’ It was only a guess. Without my charts and instruments I couldn’t be sure of anything.
‘I think at least one of us will be OK,’ JL said, but he knew as little as I did. Those were the last clear words I heard him utter. Suddenly, the dark sea filled our forward view, pale ripples reflecting the moonlight. We were already much lower than I had realized. Our dive had taken us to about a couple of hundred feet above the sea. JL leaned the weight of his body to the side, shoving the control column to the left – the plane briefly steadied, but we were so close to the surface of the water that we could see the surging shape of the waves.
JL shouted something, but I was unable to understand him.
The engines throttled back, the nose dipped. I could see the waves through the gaps in the fuselage ahead of us where the nose of the aircraft had been blasted away. I stared ahead, filled with a terrible despair. I could smell the salty sea on the freezing air that was rushing in at us. It reminded me, with shocking clarity, of childhood holidays at the seaside. Windy days, huddling out of the rain in a hut on the edge of the beach at Southend, the wide flat sands damp from the ebbing tide. That cold salt wind. I was certain I was about to die. This turned out to be how it was when you died: you died with your childhood before you. I was immobilized with fear, the sight of the sea, the huge black surface rising up towards us at a crazy angle and at a terrifying speed, believing that the end was upon me and that all my life this finality had been selected by that one moment in childhood.
There the flight ended. I cannot remember the moment of the crash or how I was thrown out of the wreck. I next remember I was in the water, floating face down, surrounded by the appalling, unlimited coldness of the sea. I was rising and falling with a sick sensation. Water was in my face, ears, nose, mouth, eyes. When I tried to draw breath I felt an awful fullness in my lungs, a sensation that I couldn’t open them any more to draw in air. Somewhere, from deep and low inside me, a last bubble of air choked out of my throat and burst briefly around my eyes. I snapped into awareness, thinking that I had lost even that, that last gasp of air. I raised my head backwards out of the water, to a black nightmare of heaving, swelling waves, then down again beneath the surface. But I had been in the air so I struggled and floundered again in the dark, pushing my face out of the water, my mouth out of the water, trying to suck in air, trying to empty my lungs of the sea.
Every attempt to breathe was a struggle against death. I coughed, spurted water, sucked at the air, but too late! I was under the waves and taking in more water. I choked it out somehow, breathed again, sank again. I thrashed my arms, trying to lift myself out of the water long enough to live.
I was surrounded by floating debris from the plane. As I flailed my arms about, struggling for life, they sometimes banged against these small pieces of wreckage. I snatched at whatever they were, trying to interrupt the endless deadly sequence of sinking and resurfacing. Most of the flotsam was too small to hold my weight and anyway slipped from my grasp.
I was tiring rapidly, wanted to end the struggle, to give up and let death take me. I choked once more, tasting vomit-flavoured salt water as it jetted out through my nose and mouth. I thought that was it, that I was breathing only water. I let go, slipped backwards, relaxing at last, feeling the weight of my flying gear drag me under. It was a relief to give way to death, to glimpse the darkness that was waiting for me beyond life. The rage to live had gone.
But a wave washed over my face and as it did so I felt air bubbles bursting from my mouth. Somehow I had taken in air.
Once again I struggled to the surface and gasped for breath.
There beside me, dark and silent, was the round shape of the emergency dinghy, self-inflated on impact. I swung an arm up, clasped one of the ratlines, got my elbow through it, then after another long effort, fighting the pain that was erupting from my leg, I managed to hook my other arm through the rope.
I clung there, my head at last safely above the surface of the water, breathing in with a horrible gulping desperation, but breathing. Gradually my panting steadied. Breathing became almost normal and whenever the choppy sea raised itself high enough to splash a wave across my face, I was able to hold my breath for a second or two, shake off the water, then breathe again. I was not going to drown after all.
The next enemies, clamouring to take me, were the cold and the pain.
It became vital that I should somehow manage to pull myself out of the water, flip myself over the inflated wall and fall into the rubber well of the dinghy, where I might lie in comparative dryness until rescue came.
Somehow, in that freezing May night, against the huge swell of the sea, against the pain and weakness in my body, I must have done that, because my next memory is of the breaking dawn, a rubbery smell, a soft and shifting floor beneath me, a curve of bright yellow rubber against a dark blue sky, a sense that the sea was distant, that I was tossing somewhere alone, perhaps in some after-life limbo.
Yet when I hauled myself to the inflated yellow tube that was the wall of the dinghy and raised myself up with both elbows so that I could see over the edge, there was the great endless sea around me, everywhere, heaving and grey. The sun glinted low and yellow from between dark clouds on the horizon.
I felt the touch of wind.
I lay there, probably in great danger of dying but no longer in any condition to know or care, when at last my dinghy was spotted by an aircraft. I heard the engine but I was too weak to wave or set off the flares. The pilot tipped the plane’s wings, swooped down over me, turned at a distance, flew low across me again. Then the aircraft headed away. By that time it no longer mattered to me whether it was British, German or any other nationality, but it turned out that it must have been British. Two hours after the plane flew away an RAF Air-Sea Rescue launch came out and saved my life.
I was alone on that sea, the only survivor from our plane. If there was a miracle that night it was one that saved me. Of the others, Ted, Col, Lofty, Kris, JL, they were killed when the aircraft was shot down, or if they survived that then they must have drowned after the plane hit the sea.
That was the end of JL, the last I knew of him. ‘I think at least one of us will be OK,’ he had said to me in the last moments before he died.