Krefeld

We called Piotr Paluchowski the Pink Pole.

That’s because he wasn’t quite a Red, if you see what I mean. Not that there was anything wrong with being a Red. In 1944 the Red was our ally in the Roman sense: our enemy’s enemy. Anyway, to get back to the Pink Pole: the night this began, he nearly killed the lot of us, and then he saved our lives. That must have been about late August 1944 – I’ll check the date for you in my logbook later, if you like – and we were into the seventh trip of our tour, flying in a lovely used-up old lady of a Lancaster bomber.

We had come through the first few trips, which was when most crews got the chop, and were well into the next danger area. That was the cocky we know the bloody lot stage. That’s when most of the rest copped it. If you could keep going, get through ten or twelve trips, your chances of surviving another twenty before they screened you out of operations for a rest increased spectacularly, although it never felt like that at the time. We were too cocky by half the night the Pole almost killed us. It was on a trip to Krefeld – you never forget Krefeld.

We had overlooked two vital factors. First was that we hadn’t yet met a single Jerry night fighter, and second was that Paluchowski, like most of the Poles and Czechs, had joined up to kill Germans. Personal longevity wasn’t in his business plan. Looking back, Krefeld cured us of this curious oversight: we had to watch him after that.

We had this simple drill: everyone in the aircraft not actively involved in flying the damned thing, or dropping bombs on the gut volk in Germany, was supposed to spend every spare moment trying to spot them: gazing into the night sky looking for Mr Kraut and his radar-directed night fighter, as well as our brother aircraft: flying into another Lanc, or worse still a Hallibag or Stirling (both were hefty, strong brutes), could kill you just as efficiently as the Kraut could, believe me. If you caught a glimpse of anything out there that was darker or lighter than the rest of the night sky, you shouted out. No time for thinking; you just hollered. If you stopped to think it was already too late. You hollered ‘Corkscrew port!’ or ‘Corkscrew starboard!’ and the Old Man threw the bus into a violent corkscrew flight pattern towards the shape you thought you had seen. In fact some crews even used corkscrew left or right as the commands. You could say that just a fraction of a second quicker. No one complained about false alarms – they were just too relieved to blame you. Having screamed out the command, a gunner, if it was a gunner that had seen whatever it was, was free to open fire. Pete the Pole was our rear gunner: he was more interested in killing Krauts than getting us out of the way, which is something we should have anticipated. You following me so far? We were coned by searchlights on the run in – the bomb run – over Krefeld, and the Old Man, Grease – our Canadian pilot – flung our thirty tons of fully laden bomber around the sky like a sports plane, to throw off those lights – and then, because we were cocky and immortal, told us we were going to circle around, gain height, and do it all over again to put the eggs we were carrying into the right basket (ten trips later we would have dumped them in the nearest bloody field and bolted for home). It was during the dive away from that second stupid run across the target that the fighter ran in behind us, and the Pole, instead of shouting out, let him in close enough to get a good shot. Looking back, I think the three things happened simultaneously: Paluchowski started firing at the Kraut, shouted ‘Corkscrew port!’ and the Kraut pilot let us have it at close range. Our bus physically staggered, like someone who has been unexpectedly slapped several times around the face. There was a lot of noise, both inside and outside the aircraft – bits were coming off, after all – and behind us in the sky was a light like those thousand suns you’ve read about, because the Kraut, flying down the Pole’s bullet stream, simply blew up: two Krauts in an Me 110 most like, doing the Valhalla Quickstep wondering what the hell had happened to them when the music stopped.

Grease recovered the old lady at about 7,000 feet – which meant that we’d lost 10 in less than a minute – and it was immediately obvious that all was not quite as it should have been: she’d lost her knickers. At least, that’s what it felt like. It was bloody draughty, for a start. There were big holes all over the shop, letting in the freezing cold air at 150 miles per hour. You get the picture. There were several small fires, which I helped the Toff, our mid-upper gunner, extinguish, then we had a call through on the intercom, and found that we were all still there and alive. Almost immediately the radio gave out a spitting stream of blue sparks, and lapsed into sullen static. Toff had taken a shell splinter through his right ankle. He didn’t notice until after we had finished with the fires.

Something was very wrong with the way our old girl was flying – turning stubbornly to starboard all the time: Grease was having to fight her into a straight line. It was the port outer of our four engines: we could see that it had taken a slap, because the cowling was missing. Every now and again a small flame would shoot out behind it, and then bang, like a car’s backfire. It was racing way beyond its maximum rev rating, and we couldn’t kill the damned thing: Fergal – our engineer from Belfast – couldn’t cut off the fuel flow to it or fully feather its propeller, which was racing faster than the other three, pushing us to starboard around the axis of the wings. You still following this? You need a quick course in bomber design? All you need to know is that, unlike its frightened crew, the old cow wanted to fly in a circle. The port aileron had also copped it and was flapping around like a Wren’s drawers, both elevators had stiffened up, and there were pieces missing from one of the rudders. Both main wheels had dropped, and one of the bomb-bay doors had badly distorted, letting in even more cold night air: don’t get me wrong, she could fly like that, but had definitely seen better days.

That wasn’t the last time we left pieces of aeroplane all over Germany, but you remember your first time. It’s just like your first kiss.

Conroy, the navigator, unflappable as usual, passed Grease the first direction for an unorthodox course for England, Home and True Glory. I should have had a lot to do – but there was a hole in my radio I could pass my arm through: cold air was rushing in. I tried stuffing that with Conroy’s spare maps but after a few minutes they started to smoulder – so the cold proved to be the lesser of the two evils. I made myself useful binding up the Toff’s foot and giving him a shot of morphine. What might surprise you is that there was no talk of putting it down in Krautland and surrendering, or using our chutes. You might call that British pluck. I’d call it something to do with rumours we’d heard about angry Kraut civilians killing bomber crews with spades and forks. They are an agricultural race at heart, your Germans.

It was Conroy who passed me a shakily written note from Grease: Fergal must have written it down, because Grease’s hands were full at the time. It read: Charlie – fix the fucking radio. NOW.

I got frostbite that night, with my fingers inside my smashed-up RT and WT equipment, and got an honourable mention in the squadron operational daybook as a reward. I always wanted one of those.

As luck would have it I brought the internal communications back very quickly. A piece of shrapnel had laid open an insulated wire, and bridged it to the cage, creating a mark one short. As I pulled the shrapnel clear with my fingers I didn’t feel the jolt from the electrical short until it reached my wrist – I was already that cold. You can’t work inside radios with gloves, you see. At least we could talk to each other then: other than that it was mostly a dead loss. After an hour’s work all feeling in my hands had gone and my upper arms were hurting so bad with the cold that I was crying. I was able to hear other bombers exchanging with base and station controllers, but the signals drifted in and out randomly, like spirit voices at a seance in Surbiton – I had no control of them. On a couple of occasions I was able to speak to one of the aircraft myself, but never to England. Grease thought that they were physically very close to us – once I got an acknowledgement just as we wallowed in the airstream of a Lanc overtaking us in the race for home. I remember feeling very lonely at that moment, even in the knowledge that my pals were in the aircraft all about me.

One of Fergal’s jobs was keeping a record of the fuel consumption, and reminding the skipper of what we had left: arguably a futile activity when one engine’s racing away consuming fuel twice as fast as you normally allow for. It was glowing red hot, with less time between the misfires, and at least one of the wing tanks had been holed and was squirting out fuel into the air.

Martin Weir, Marty, the bomb aimer, had just called back: ‘Dutch coast; Channel ahead – no flak,’ when Fergal said, ‘Skipper?’

‘Yes, Fergal?’

‘You know I said that we had fuck-all fuel left, back there?’

‘Yeah, so what?’

‘Well now we’ve got fuck fuck all left. If we clear the Channel put her down on the first bit of flat you see.’

Conroy broke in. ‘Don’t worry, Skip. Keep this heading. Manston’s coming up in about . . . seventeen minutes – they’ve got a nice long new runway there.’ Conroy was lying about the elapsed time, but we all felt better for it.

Grease said, ‘Thank God for that. Charlie, where the hell is that radio?’

‘Most of the best bits are still in Germany, Skip.’

‘Keep trying for us, Charlie. Keep trying until we’re on the deck.’

‘OK, Skip.’

I privately agreed with Conners: sometimes you have to lie to the bosses to keep their spirits up, you know – otherwise they’re likely to give up on you and go to pieces. What I was actually doing was sitting on my hands to get the feeling back, rigid with fear, and chilled in the airstream of my exploded radio. I tried again.

More than seventeen minutes later – it seemed hours – Marty shouted, ‘Runway lights,’ from up front in his glass blister, and then, ‘Aw Christ!’

Grease said, ‘I see it. Heads down everyone,’ to which he added, ‘Sorry, Charlie, not you – keep trying to raise them: we’ll do one quick low circuit, then barrel straight in – I might just beat the fog.’

‘What fog?’ I asked Marty.

‘The fucking great bank of it rolling down from the north, it’s—’

‘Shut up,’ said Grease, ‘I’m thinking.’

The truth was, he was straining. It had taken all his strength to fight the line against our runaway engine, even though Fergus had looped a belt around the spade grip of the control column and was taking a share of the pull. I was shamed into doing my bit, spinning the dial and broadcasting to anyone – anyone – with the wit to be listening out for it. Grease was taking us on a great leftward sweep low around the airfield, at one point flying parallel to the great malignant wall of fog. The runway lights kept on flashing on and off. That must have been a nervous duty flying control officer in the cabin down there, scared of intruder night fighters stooging around, waiting for busted birds like us. I got a weak response from someone, but lost it immediately.

Grease said, ‘Don’t mind,’ then, ‘OK we’re going in – lining her up now.’ He had this flair for the dramatic you see.

Don’t believe all the guff they tell you about spatial disorientation. When you fly a lot as a passenger you get instinctive messages from your body which tell you about the attitude of the aircraft: most of them are right. You don’t always have to see an outside world to work out where you are in relation to it. I knew that Grease had levelled her out, straightened her up and was putting her down – without flaps to slow us through the air, without brakes to slow us on the ground, and an undercarriage which would collapse if it hadn’t already locked down.

Again Marty shouted, ‘Aw Christ!’ and before I could assume that the fog had beaten us to the runway, added ‘There’s another Lanc in front! Less than fifty yards . . .’

The new guy must have gone straight in like us, trying to beat the fog.

I want you to understand this problem. The new guy was making a slower, routine approach, and had brakes to slow himself on the ground. We could land behind him no worries, but once on the deck we would collect him as soon as he slowed down. And we would be travelling too fast to turn aside, even if the undercart held up – a turn at a hundred miles per hour would rip it off, and we would cartwheel. Up his arse most likely.

Grease didn’t have to shout ‘Charlie’ the way he did, I was already spinning the clock and screaming at the radio, begging the newcomer to get off our road. Toff told me later that I was screaming so loud he reckoned they could have heard me in the other kite even without the radio.

Afterwards Marty always used to say that what happened next was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. He couldn’t take his eyes off the Lanc in front of us. When he tells it he says, ‘That Lanc was death in front of me, and it hypnotized me; I didn’t move to a safer place or anything, because there wasn’t one. I knew that we were going to fly into it, and that stuck out there in front I was going to get it first. And I didn’t care. I don’t think I ever really cared again.’ Just as the new Lanc touched – just as its wheels kissed the runway in a very sweet three-point landing – the pilot turned the taps on again, raised his main wheels and flaps, and climbed away into the fog. One moment he was there, and the next he was gone.

Grease had his hands and feet too full of Lancaster to think about it. He produced an unusually acceptable landing, and then proceeded to weave the great wounded beast gently from side to side to get the speed off. The engines died on us just as Fergal moved the throttle controls down their box – he had been right about the rate we had been using fuel. Instead of running off the end of the runway, as we anticipated, the old bus slowed quite quickly, but started to pull perversely in the other direction, to port. As I recall, Grease swore quite imaginatively about this last trick she played on us. When we were down to walking pace, he let her pull off the runway to the left and park herself on the grass. Then the fog swallowed us.

It turned out that the port main wheel was punctured and three-quarters deflated. It had acted like one of the brakes we no longer had before the tyre ripped itself to shreds at the last knockings.

One of the things I can confirm is that when you’ve landed a kite that’s full of holes and unfriendly pieces of German ammunition, you don’t hang about in it. I can’t remember getting out, sliding over the main spar, stomping down to the little square door near the tail; what I do remember is how quiet it was out there in the fog. We stood in a group. The Pink Pole looked unconcerned, and as usual was the first to light up. The Toff was hobbling about, trying to find out why his ankle wasn’t working, and Grease stood awkwardly, his right arm clenched hard into his body – like a response to a stomach pain. I wondered if he had been hit and had kept quiet about it, so I faced off with him and tried to straighten his arm. I couldn’t.

‘It’s locked. Can’t move it,’ he said.

In finding the strength to hold the Lanc against its natural inclination to fly in tight circles, he had locked and cramped the muscle in his arm. It unlocked about an hour later.

It was one of those wet, noise-distorting fogs, but we could hear a vehicle crawling around the perimeter track at the edge of the airfield, hopefully looking for us. You could see that Grease was listening hard, but it wasn’t for that. It was for the Lanc who’d made way for us. You could hear its four Packard Merlin engines moaning as it circled low looking for a hole in the fog, or for the airfield’s FIDO fog lights to be switched on. We all knew the score; if it was still stooging around instead of sloping off to an airfield which wasn’t fogged-in yet, then it hadn’t enough fuel to do so. Sooner or later it would have to have a shot at landing or excavate an unfriendly hillside.

The vehicle found us first, a small Bedford five-cwt. lorry with a tilt, and benches in the back. An old crew bus, most likely. Surprisingly the driver was a sparks – a radio operator – like me, and his passenger up front a full wing commander. The Wingco was a tall, lanky type; tired looking with a bit of a cadaverous face, and deep sunk dark eyes.

He offered cigarettes, and when he spoke it was with a languid almost drawling accent. ‘Nice landing, Skipper.’ He held out his hand to shake Grease’s, but Grease could only offer his left. They looked odd for a moment, two men holding hands like girls. ‘I saw you touch down just before this lot rolled in – no brakes left?’

‘Not much of anything left, sir.’

He laughed with us. Not a bad type. It was good seeing Grease standing there swapping jokes with a wingco as if there wasn’t a half mile of rank between them. It was often like that – out there on the runways and the field you all could be just fliers – the rank nonsense didn’t kick in until you were standing inside RAF bricks and mortar.

‘Care for a lift?’ he said.

‘Thanks, but we’ve got to wait for . . .’ Grease raised his left thumb towards the sound of the circling Lancaster.

‘Of course. I’ll just wait in the bus then.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Pleasure, old boy.’

He angled off towards where the lorry was parked with a stiff, deliberate gait, like a heron stalking minnows in the shallows. I heard the door click shut, and then the engine die. I was left alongside the sparks who had been driving him. He was a ranker too – a full flight lieutenant – but you could tell he had been a sergeant; he had the look.

‘Your fingers don’t look too clever,’ he said.

‘That’s the trouble with Lancs; they either burn you to death or freeze you.’

We both grinned: we were alive, after all.

‘Any other damage?’

‘Toff – mid upper – he’s got a cut foot, and it’s a funny shape. I haven’t told him that yet.’

‘I suppose you all want to wait for the other guy to get down. From your mob, is he?’ We ducked instinctively as the lost bird thundered low overhead again, looking for a way down, poor sod. The fog eddied in its wake, then stilled again.

‘Haven’t a clue, but . . . yeah, we’ll wait, if you don’t mind.’

There was one of those moments when everything seems momentarily crisper, as if life comes into sharp focus, and every detail is etched on to your brain like a photograph. As if you are an actor in a film.

What do the Japs call it? Kamikaze – divine wind? Well, it might as well have been. First I felt a tug of breeze. It seemed to blow the droplets of moisture in the air against my cheek as if I was crying again, but I wasn’t. Then it came on again, but stronger. Not for long, but long enough. You often get these eddies on the edge of a fog bank, but rarely just when you need them – like this one. It must have cut a swathe through the fog a hundred yards deep, across the runway. Control used his noddle and flipped on the lights, and our late saviour saw his one chance and went straight for the gap. Gear down, flaps down, engines cut as the wheels touched. If Grease’s landing had been unusually neat then this one was poetry. The pilot ran on, on his main wheels this time, American style, holding the tail wheel clear of the runway until the speed was off her; then he dropped her tail and pulled her off the concrete to port, and parked not thirty yards from the heap of junk we’d just brought back from Germany.

Up close the new Lanc had no markings – it could have been a special squadron. It was brand new, I’ll tell you that. Maybe we could make some sort of a trade for it. Pete was good at deals.

However, we came to the conclusion that the Lanc which had saved our collective bacon was a new replacement kite being delivered by one of those civilian pilots. They were definitely second division jobs. That might seem a bit bloody silly – but like all first-time crews at the start of their tour of ops, we were a bit like that: God’s gift to the RAF. The position of operational aircrew was one we thought the civilian bus drivers couldn’t attain. And now we owed one a favour, and had the sneaking suspicion that this guy – whoever he was – was probably a better pilot than Grease. Somebody was throwing away my team’s carefully constructed social status rule book. You can see that it was an interesting little problem: but not half as interesting as when we actually faced the bastard.

He didn’t bother with the short ladder that drops beneath the fuselage door in the Lanc. This small pilot, with the face of a fourteen-year-old boy, just swung his feet over the ledge, dropped the four feet to the grass and strolled over. Then he pulled off the old leather flying helmet he wore (over an equally old Sidcot suit – probably from the twenties) and black curls tumbled to her shoulders. Yeah, you heard me: her. Some girl. Some girl who had just given us the rest of our lives back, after the RAF had nearly thrown them away.

Grease always held that the first thirty seconds you spent with a woman dictated whether you were going to make it or not. He believed that a man needed to be noticed. It made him unpredictable around females. This time it made him throw himself lengthwise on the grass and kiss her flying boots. My first glance at her face told me it didn’t usually come to rest in humour lines, because she grimaced. As she pulled her helmet clear of her hair she looked serious, even a little cross, like a schoolteacher – but then Grease on the ground in front of her earned a smile, and a little gurgling laugh.

‘Is he always like this?’ she said.

I stepped forward and held out my hand. ‘He loves flying, and he loves girls and he loves still being alive. So you’ve brought out the worst in him,’ I said.

She couldn’t move because Grease had wrapped his arm around her ankles, but she asked me, ‘And you are?’

‘Don’t laugh at my name – I’m Charlie Bassett, the sparks,’ – that smile again – ‘and the man at your feet is Grease McKenzie, sergeant pilot and our skipper. He’s Canadian.’

The other five came forward to introduce themselves and give thanks for deliverance. The Pink Pole, who was short (a lot of the good rear gunners were), stood on the small of Grease’s back to make up for it, and raised her hand to his lips. When Grease stood up there was grass and mud on his clothes, and the stupidest damned smile on his face that I’ve ever seen a man wear.

She said, ‘I’m Grace . . .’

Grace said her family name was Baker, although it turned out to be Ralph-Baker (she said ‘Rafe’), and she held back the double clanger until she knew us better. Later in the tour, after we had met a few, we came to realize that many of these civilian delivery pilots were ex-airline pilots or racing types, who had all-round flying skills we could only wonder at.

She dealt with this very directly whilst we were crammed into the back of the truck, and driven around to the admin block. Grease said, ‘That was a great touchdown,’ but you could tell from his voice that, as tired and in pain as he was, he was brooding over it.

‘How many hours have you got?’ Grace asked him.

‘On Lancasters?’

‘On anything.’

He looked relieved, and waved his good arm expansively. He said, ‘250; a few more. What about you?’

‘Thousands,’ she said, and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke. Turkish: Passing Clouds. I guess that we all looked away for a moment.

I cut into the silence, and asked her, ‘Did you overshoot and go round again because you heard me on the radio, screaming for you to get out of the way?’

‘No, Charlie. I heard you, but not in the way you think. There was nothing on the radio except the duty controller giving me my approach, and asking me to get a move on. My coccyx heard you.’

Marty snorted, and Conners Conroy grinned. I could see him in the gloom.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘It’s the small bone at the bottom of your spine,’ offered Toff. Then he said, ‘Ouch!’ because he was beginning to feel his ankle.

‘I know what it is, dummy. That still doesn’t help.’

Grace said, ‘When something important is going to happen – when I have to do something, and do it now, my coccyx vibrates: tingles, if you like. It’s a danger signal. As soon as my coccyx spoke I put the throttles through the gate, switched the mixture, lifted the wheels and the flaps, and went round again. It never fails.’

I wasn’t sure if she was serious. ‘It could have killed you this time, if you hadn’t got down through the fog,’ I said.

She said to me very gently, as if I was a child, ‘If you had landed on top of me, I would have been killed for certain, wouldn’t I?’

By the time we had crawled up to the red brick admin buildings the fog had seeped into the truck, and into our bones. A door opened letting out a faint light. The man who came through it was big, portly and wore an RAF greatcoat over flannel pyjamas and carpet slippers.

‘Are you the intelligence officer, sir?’ I asked him.

‘No sonny, the medical officer. What’s the use of you being debriefed by an IO who doesn’t know where you’ve been, what you were supposed to be doing there, or whether you’re shooting a line? Do that on your own station when you get back. Hop out now, chop chop. Who needs the medicine man?’ He spoke with a rich, plummy Welsh accent.

Grease took charge again. ‘You’d better see to Charlie’s fingers: they got too cold, and Toff’s got a flakky foot – and I suppose you’d better have a look at my arm. The kite was pulling to starboard all the way back, and I had to pull it the other way: now my arm’s locked up.’

Whilst he was saying this Toff hopped out on to the road, and fell down because his ankle had finally stopped working. The fog now felt horribly refreshing, but I suddenly wanted desperately to lie down and go to sleep: the voices around me faded in and out like radio signals caught in the Heavyside Layer. I heard the sparks who drove us saying something like, ‘You keep these three Doc; we’ll shoogle up the mess boys and find some breakfast.’

Shoogle, I thought – he must be a Scot: Glaswegian most likely.

My memory stops there for some hours. They must have done whatever they needed to my fingers, and bandaged them up. I was always awake early in the morning – a habit I never managed to break – and found myself cleaned up, wearing service flannel pyjamas, on a ward in the station medical unit. I felt good. Toff was in the bed opposite, snoring as loudly as the flak which had almost killed him, and they can’t have had a busy week on the Kent airfield because we had the ward to ourselves. Grease, Marty and the rest of the crew were competing in the snore competition, lying sprawled fully clothed on top of other beds. Marty was cuddling an empty beer bottle. He liked cuddling things. Grease was cuddling the girl from the new Lanc – they were curled up, her back to his front, like a couple of commas: his huge arm was around her. I remember thinking, So that’s how it is, then someone farted, someone else began to stir, and I noticed that my fingers hurt.

For a fighter station the whole place was astonishingly well organized. All of my gear was hanging in a long open locker by my bed, my uniform had been brushed down, and even my flying boots had had a once over. Nothing had been stolen: if they treated their sergeants like this I was in the wrong command. As the others came round it was obvious that they had been on a bender, and probably felt worse than the Toff and me. They were horribly hungover – but they got both of us out of our pits, washed, shaved and approximately dressed us, and found a stout walking stick for Toff.

The MO caught up with us having an illegal private breakfast at a table in a corner of the officers’ mess. It was quiet as a church. Didn’t anybody from here fight before noon?

‘You all right, Sergeant?’ he barked at me.

‘Somebody’s put bandages all over the ends of my hands; I’m not sure that there are fingers in there any more,’ I said.

‘Nor am I. Get a pal to cut up your food for you for a couple of days, and see your own MO when you get back. Now; what about you?’ he said to Toff.

The Toff sniffed and said. ‘My foot’s flopping about a bit. Doesn’t go where I tell it. I borrowed this stick.’ He waved it.

‘I know: it’s mine. Get someone to do your walking for you for a couple of days, and see your own MO when you get back.’ Then he pulled the chair back with a scrape, sat down with a beaming smile, and added, ‘You’d have to pay for that in Civvy Street!’

The tea kept on coming forever, and it remains one of the happiest breakfasts I remember.

We hadn’t expected an engineering officer who spent his days polishing Spitfires to come up with anything original to do to a fucked-up Lancaster, and we weren’t disappointed. He was a lieutenant in a set of snow-white overalls – the cleanest engineering officer I had ever seen. He came marching starchily up to us after the table had been cleared by the mess servants, glared at us distastefully, and waited for our response. Grease leapt up, overzealously stamped to attention and saluted, his eyes fixed about three feet over the EO’s head. There was a problem with his salute. It was a right hand fingernail inspection: Nazi-style. Every time he was close to promotion he fucked it up with a stunt like that. We all followed suit, but with proper salutes. Except for Toff, who tried and fell over. The fat MO grinned, and Grace giggled.

‘Sergeants in the officers’ mess. Irregular. Don’t like it,’ said the EO.

‘Station commander’s order, sir. We slept in the hospital,’ said Grease.

‘That’s all right then.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Your kite’s a bloody mess. What’s more we’ve got nothing heavy enough to pull it out of the way.’

‘Sorry about that, sir.’

‘Not your fault, Sergeant. Just bloody inconvenient.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anyway. Came to tell you that she’s not going anywhere under her own steam again. I’ve spoken with the salvage and reclamation johnnies, and they’ve put things in train. Which is what you’ve to do, by the way – spoken to your squadron leader. You’re to proceed to your home station by rail as soon as you can – they miss you apparently. Spoken to the watch officer – there will be rail passes at the gatehouse. Bus in about an hour’s time.’

‘Sorry I won’t be flying her home, sir.’

For the first time in this exchange Grease wasn’t taking the piss. There was a change in his voice and in the EO’s attitude. He sighed and said, ‘Yes, I know, Sergeant,’ and there was a short embarrassed silence, which he broke with, ‘It’s very irregular, but seeing as you’re here now, I suppose I better get these bastards to open the bar and buy you all a drink.’

The MO closed it down with, ‘Well said, Willy,’ and the rest of us added noises, the sum of which meant that although we would be embarrassed to be seen drinking with fighter johnnies, we could swallow our pride if someone else was buying.

Grace wasn’t buying. The EO was trying to become the living embodiment of his Christian name and do a job on Grace, but she wasn’t buying. Secretly, I think that he, too, was fascinated by the thought that someone so small could fly something so big, which she capped by explaining that the first multi-engined aircraft she had delivered had been Sunderland Flying Boats – each about as big as Blenheim Palace: they even have beds for half the crew and a fully equipped kitchen. Eventually he asked her when she was taking the new Lancaster away, and to where.

‘The controller wants me away between 1415 and 1430. I’ve got to drop it off at an airfield near Cambridge – Bawne. But I probably shouldn’t be telling you that. Then I get a long weekend off. My family live close by,’ she said.

The EO initially thought that we were laughing at him, and looked miffed – he was buying, after all; then Grace twigged that we were laughing at her, and popped her mouth into the upside-down smile – there was something going on here which she didn’t understand, and she didn’t like that. So we rearranged ourselves in a line facing her, performed a crew-left-turn, and held out our right fists to her, thumbs up. Miss Baker was filing a flight plan for the field from which we had set out twenty hours previously.

‘In that case,’ said the MO, ‘you boys have got time, guests or not, to buy me another couple of pints before you leave.’ It would have to be on a slate. We flew without English money.

Flying Down to Rio – you’ll have seen that film, of course, fleet-foot Fred and gorgeous Ginger – anyway, flying home took less time than it takes to see the film. The new Lanc smelled of paint and hot, new wiring, not of piss and fear: she was fast, responsive and skittish: a pleasure to fly in. Bloody thoroughbred. We all huddled south of the main spar, but Grease flew the dickey alongside the pilot, where the engineer usually parked. Fergal didn’t complain: he went to sleep. Marty produced the stub of his lucky pencil, and we all wrote our names on the aircraft’s inside skin. It was obvious to us that we wouldn’t be flying our dear old girl again, and this new one would suit. There was a sort of unwritten – forgive what turns into a pun – squadron rule, that if a team signed an aircraft it was more or less theirs. It was a bit cheeky for a crew of rookies like us to sign a brand new kite, but seriously, you don’t look at life straight on when you measure it in days rather than years. The point is that no one liked flying a kite which had been signed by another crew; although you had to, from time to time. So we were making a pre-emptive strike to put off the opposition, because there was always a scrap for a new aircraft.

Grace flew with old pre-war goggles on her forehead, and a map strapped to her left leg like a single-seat pilot. When Conroy told her later that he was impressed by her navigation she gave him a just how dumb are you? stare, and said that she flew along the railway lines. We learned that she had bucket-loads of stares where that came from. Her dad would have said that it was breeding; mine would have called her a stuck-up cow. Sure enough, when she turned the folded map over there was a creased and tattered Railways of Great Britain map underneath. She made a bloody good landing too and, directed by Grease, parked it on the hardstanding we’d vacated with our old lady just the evening before.

Three khaki vehicles set out in leisurely fashion from alongside the watch office caravan as soon as the props stopped spinning. There was the CO’s nasty little Hillman, another Bedford crew lorry and the meat wagon. Our CO was Squadron Leader Delve. We called him Bushes on account of his huge moustache. It took me weeks to get used to the fact that his principal method of communication was by shouting at the lower ranks. It would be nice to write that we would have flown through the gates of Hades for him: I should cocoa. Although many did, of course.

He leapt out of his car, ran towards us and shouted, ‘And where the fuck do you think you’ve been? Bloody AWOL? . . . and where’s your bloody aeroplane? Throw the Toff in the ambulance, you lot take the bus down to debrief – the IO has been waiting all bloody morning for you – and where’s the tart? She’s with me.’

‘The tart’s here,’ answered Grace, stepping from behind Grease, pulling off her flying helmet and ruffling her hair, ‘and she’s got a bloody name, if you’d care to use it. Unless you want to start collecting your own bloody Lancasters.’

One of those frozen moments. No one speaks to Bushes that way. Grace is smiling icily, and the rest of us are pretending not to have heard. Then Bushes – bright red in the face, rather than just the nose, for once – snorts some sort of a laugh, claps a hand over his mouth and says, ‘Oops! Sorry, Miss,’ for us all to hear.

Then embarrassment number three that day. Bushes grabs Grease’s hand as if to shake it, but doesn’t – they just hold. He doesn’t have to say, I’m so pleased you all made it, because it’s all there in the gesture, and written all over his ugly mug. Fergal had a big happy grin, and Conroy turned away with watery eyes. We’d all joined the Silly Buggers Club, I think. The Pink Pole looked bemused and fumbled for cigarettes because he’d left most of the feelings he’d started life with in Warsaw.

We weren’t as gentle with the Toff as we should have been. The wince-and-moan show he put on for the MO would have been worth at least a ten-day leave ticket on any other station. As we climbed over the tailgate of the Bedford, Grease asked Bushes, ‘Are we on for tonight?’

Bushes shook his head. ‘Naw. You’ve no kite, have you?’

Grease glanced at the new one.

Bushes followed his glance, and shook his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’ve no bleeding chance. I’ll give it to someone who’ll look after it. You’re only good for cast-offs at the moment. Anyway, it will take three or four days just to get her ready. They need work before they’re ready to go – or didn’t anyone tell you that? A complete set of radios and a bombsight would come in bloody handy for a start.’

‘So what do we do, whitewash the coal until you find us some bucket to fly in?’ Then he added ‘sir,’ after just the right length of pause. The bastard Canadians are real aces at insolence when they want to be. Anywhere else, and with anyone else, that would have earned him five days cooling his heels.

‘What’s today? ‘asked Bushes.

Conroy supplied. ‘Friday. Pay day, sir.’

‘Well then, you’re stood down until, say, Tuesday. Crash leave. Fuck off to London and get drunk. Just keep out of my way.’

Just as the WAAF driver was about to start away with us Bushes stepped back again to the tailgate of the truck. His question didn’t seem to be addressed to any specific one of us. Grace had just spoken to him, but we hadn’t heard what was said. Something was happening and I had missed it. Bushes indicated the new Lanc and asked, ‘You’ve flown in her: what’s her name then?’

Grease started to say. ‘Gr—’ but he was stopped by the Pink Pole, who surprised us by saying, ‘Tuesday’s Child. We called her Tuesday’s Child.’

Bushes just shrugged and walked away to his car, where Grace was standing by the passenger door, smiling prettily.

Marty offered, ‘D’ye think we’ll get crash leave for every one of your landings we walk away from Skip? They’re bad enough, most of the time.’

Grease hit him. We scrummed around enough for the truck to swerve in response. Marty asked, ‘Do you think that Grace’s a bit of all right?’

‘Pretty,’ Pete said. ‘Pretty well used. Pretty clever. Maybe pretty damned dangerous.’ Pete was good at women. He asked, ‘What does Charlie think?’

‘She’d never look at me,’ I told them. I probably looked away.

There was one thing to remember about the debriefing with the intelligence officer, apart from the fact we each insisted on our post-raid rum from the padre, even though we’d been back thirteen hours already. We heard the Pink Pole saying, ‘. . . so I let the bastard get in very, very close, so I knew that I could hit him, and then I pissed all over him with my .303s. Then pouff, he blows up, just like a firework!’ Then he shut up, because he could see that we were all staring at him.

The IO looked unimpressed. ‘Any witnesses?’ he asked.

‘I saw the glow. There was the rear turret firing away, then a goddamned big explosion behind us,’ said Conroy.

‘It flung us forward about thirty feet, then down about 10,000,’ Grease added.

‘The Toff saw the whole thing. He’ll confirm it. The Pole got his Kraut all right,’ I said.

‘OK,’ said the IO, ‘I’ll put him up for it.’

And Grease again. ‘And put Charlie up for being a gallant gentleman. He almost froze his bloody fingers off keeping the radio open.’ He glared at the Pink Pole, who looked away. I tried to hide my bandages, but the IO took them in with a glance, and nodded.

Outside the IO’s office the station seemed dead. No people; no vehicles. No sense of urgency. No ops tonight. Grease said, ‘You got your Kraut then?’ to our rear gunner.

Piotr nodded – guardedly, because he could sense something odd was coming.

Grease said, ‘But he could have got us. All of us. You realize that?’

‘Killing Krauts is all that matters to me Grease, you know that. Poles killing Krauts is all that matters. Sure, he could have got me first. So what? A few Poles more or less do not matter.’

‘Canadians do,’ said Grease. We were just rounding the corner of the parachute shed, and he hit Pete so hard in the body that he lifted his feet clear off the ground. The only other person I had seen do that was my old man, ten years before. The little Pole seemed to crumple while he was still in the air, and fell to the ground like a half-filled sack of something. Grease didn’t even break stride. Neither did we. Piotr had to see the way things stood. Firstly, Grease was the leader, and what he said went, and secondly we didn’t appreciate near-death experiences. This meant that the Pole had to co-operate in order to prevent them happening to us. No grudges. Finis. That was the end of it. Piotr caught up with us as we reached our Nissen hut, and the conversations jerked back and forth as if nothing had happened.

I should say something about the hut. One of the advantages of having an all-sergeant crew was that we all lived in the same place. At Bawne we were lucky enough to get one of those small, eight-bed Nissens – which meant that the crew did literally everything together. Going out to fight together, coming back to a hut which had become like a home to us, to weep together – yeah, we did that a couple of times – eating together, drinking ourselves stupid together. It formed the sort of blood connection that those mixed-rank crews of ponces (officers) and NCOs could only dream about. Even if they try to tell you otherwise.

The lads were better than brothers to me.

If you think that having a mad Pole in the rear turret was a bit of a downer, I have to tell you that it had its upsides as well. He was an ace finder. He found things before their previous owners knew they’d lost them. And we didn’t complain about the things he found, because they included coal for the stove when the rest of the station had run out, and only the officers’ mess was supposed to have any. He could also find fresh eggs, and potatoes we could roast. He found petrol for Grease’s Red Indian motorcycle, and extra blankets when the Cambridgeshire winter was trying to freeze our balls off. And he always had a stock of fags and whisky, and nylon stockings to bribe girls with – when only the Yanks had them. What I liked best about him was that he was free with the things he found. We didn’t ask, but he always hinted that he had political sources. Although he spent some time each leave with us, he always went up to London or Edinburgh for the rest of it. Sometimes one or two of us went up with him to London, but never saw much of him because he was with other Poles most of the time – he had contacts in the embassy: a ‘Government in Exile’, Mr Churchill used to call it.

He always went away with a couple of empty kit bags, and always brought them back full. It was a bit like sharing a hut with Father Christmas – something for everyone. Maybe it was black market. Maybe it was Polish government largesse – you know, keeping the gallant allies happy. Maybe it was a bit of cloak and dagger. Or maybe it was just a bit of blagging. Who knew or cared? Not me; not till later. We didn’t complain when he appeared with a huge French box radio in the back of a small Tilley pickup. I had to retune it, but it had great range, and we could get all of the English stations, some Yank ones, and even the illegal Kraut propaganda broadcasts. They were good for the news our people were too scared to broadcast. It was the only news service that gave a halfway decent count on the aircraft we were leaving in Germany each night. Mostly it was tuned to music, though. The Savoyans, and the dance jazz the Americans played. I asked him once where he’d got it from. He said from an English infantryman who brought it back from Dunkirk. There were a lot of French souvenirs knocking around soon after Dunkirk, but nobody talked about that.

Later the afternoon that Grease had hit him, Piotr wandered over to my bed and sat on the edge. Big Hearted Arthur was belting out ‘Get in Your Shelter’ and ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ on the radio. How could the Kraut hope to beat people who thought that the war could be funny? I was stretched out reading a Zane Grey, and shoved over to make room for him.

‘Hello, squirt. Wanna smoke?’ he said.

‘You call me squirt because I’m small, or because I’m younger than the rest of you?’

‘I call you squirt because I don’t have a younger brother any more.’ That was a new one. Something was eating him, because he launched straight into, ‘You know that I like you all, Charlie? You do know that?’ He offered me a Players Airman cigarette from a new packet. I took one.

‘Of course we do, Pete. You’re the best tail gunner there is. We wouldn’t change you for anyone.’

‘I should hate it if anything happened to any of us.’

‘I know, Pete. You just forgot that up there for a sec. I don’t suppose it will happen again.’

Everyone else was earwigging us, of course – as they were supposed to – this was Piotr saying sorry, and me saving face for him. I expected him to get up and amble away, but he sat quiet for a while and then he said, ‘I don’t think Krefeld likes me, Charlie. I was scared up there last night.’

Looking back, I should have paid attention to what he was saying. But I didn’t. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Pete. When Kraut bastards are trying to kill us all night long scared is probably a very sensible thing to be. Situation normal.’

I started to turn back to my book. He gave a sad little smile and stood up. Grease was waving our dog-eared pack of playing cards at him from the far end of the hut. Pax. He left the cigarettes on my bed. He always made sure that we never ran out.

So why, you ask, hadn’t we packed our kit and shot off for four days’ leave already? It was because of the dame, of course.

Take-off was delayed by unspoken consensus, which is one of those things that happens when seven people live together. Someone must have said, I think I’ll go up tomorrow, and that made up everyone else’s minds for them. That night we smartened ourselves up, which meant a shave and borrowing one of Grease’s clean shirts – he always had bloody dozens of them – and fetched up in the sergeants’ mess just after seven, refreshed by a sleep sponsored by knowing that you were going to stay alive for another few nights at least. Pete had clipped his moustache back to a thin line; I thought that he looked just the thing.

Grace had a good sense of timing: we weren’t through the first pint before she walked in to the bar looking for us. She was wearing a plain uniform with an ATA flash, similar to a navy blue Senior Service uniform, except the skirt was cut shorter – to just below the knees – which showed off her shapely short legs, and hinted at the fine black stockings which covered them. Her dark curls bobbed as she walked. She looked wonderful, and when she gave her tight little smile across the room and marched directly to us, I was proud enough to die.

‘You still here?’ she said. ‘Gin and tonic, please.’

The mess boy, who had immediately started to hover, would have normally laughed that one off, but he blushed, turned his back, and produced one from nowhere. Yeah; it was going to be an all-right night. She didn’t leave our table, which made all of the other types jealous. Bonza. I remember Conroy, who was usually the soberest of the lot of us, being six months older than me, sort of giving her a quizzical look across the table and asking, ‘We got it then? Tuesday’s Child?’

‘Yes, of course you did,’ Grace said. ‘What do you take me for? This Tuesday’s child has a rich daddy who never says no. Few men do!’

Grease asked, ‘What d’ye have to give for it?’ He wasn’t being moody. He was just finding his way with a new woman. It was his way, and he wasn’t being facetious, either.

‘Well; let’s say that it might have been not so much a case of Tuesday’s child being full of grace, as much as Grace being full of something else. He’s an energetic old sod, by the way.’

She said this in a conversational tone that said situation normal. Grease looked away: maybe not as concerned as he thought he’d be. She could have been shooting a line, of course.

‘Dirty sod!’ Marty said.

Grace gave him a cheeky grin and said, ‘Don’t worry. Wait around and maybe you’ll get your turn. I can be choosy, without being fussy.’

No. She wasn’t shooting a line. Grease had got his girl. He’d been making a pitch for her since he had first seen her – and she had accepted his offer, but it wasn’t a one-to-one. It’s just the way she was. I’m not sure that I believed it at the time; I remember worrying about what it could do to us. Then I got a hard-on, and in a man’s game that’s the trump card, isn’t it? I can recall several conversations from the evening before we started to fall down all over the place – except the Toff, who, drunk out of his skull, started to walk straight for the first time in twenty-four hours.

That night she slept with Grease in berth eight. The one that belonged to no one. Being a crew of seven we only needed seven beds – and in our eight-bed hut, the eighth had become the guest quarters. It was a slightly larger bed than the others, and we had hidden it behind green curtain partitions liberated from the medical section. Fergal was a passionate water colourist on the quiet and had painted the insides with fantastic flowers and creatures like unicorns and centaurs. There was a utility bedside cabinet with a vase for flowers (and when appropriate, a drawer for rubber accessories), and a battered armchair that the officers’ mess had discarded. It was the berth on the left as you came in, nearest the door – the furthest part of the hut from our pathetic stove, and the coldest, but the way we saw it was that when we slept there we weren’t likely to be bothered by the cold. You see, it was where you took your girl if she didn’t have a room and you couldn’t afford one of the local hotels. I hadn’t used it much. I didn’t have a regular girl, and it’s not much fun sleeping alone in a whorehouse bed. To be honest it was Pete the Pole who used it most frequently, then I suppose it was Grease, because he always worked so much harder at it than the rest of us. Anyway; that was something like privacy in a country which no longer had any to spare.

I told you before that I have early habits. Just as the Toff was the last sleeper, who invariably topped up the stove at night, so it was me who stoked it in the morning; not a job I relished. Marty once pointed out that I was the baby of the outfit, and that kids were always up early. He got that wrong: I just never saw the point of lying awake in bed on your own. After rattling up the stove until it roared, and putting the two kettles on to boil, I did what I always do with my headaches: went outside and stuck my head into the fire bucket until the cold water crushed my brain. You know the old joke – it’s not much of a cure, but you feel much better when you stop. Mind you, I sniffed it first. It wouldn’t have been the first time that someone had pissed in it. It takes several days to get the smell of urine out of your hair.

Grease stepped outside in his singlet, shorts and running shoes. ‘Some night,’ he said, shook his head from side to side, and performed his warm-up routine.

He had been a professional hockey player in some dick Canadian town before the war, and had an obsession about physical fitness. He was more serious about it than about the war effort. He was always at his peak, and did what was needed to retain it. That meant punishing his body most mornings. He was going back to the game after all this was over. Ergo, he was not only fast, but also as strong as an ox – which suited us, because you sometimes needed a brute to wrestle a bent Lanc back from Krautsville.

I guess I nodded some sort of reply. He ran and jumped up and down on the spot until he was wreathed in steam, and the sun climbed above the horizon into a yellow and grey sky.

Then I remembered something. ‘How’s Grace?’

He gave me the Grease done it toothy grin, which made me want to throw up, and said, ‘I guess I’ll run the full five miles this morning Sparky. Should take about, say, thirty-five minutes or so. You may find that our Grace needs her radio tuning while I’m away.’ I’d never been invited to help myself to a woman before. Then he ran out on me. Literally.

As I turned back I experienced a real man’s reaction to an unexpectedly available female: I was scared. Inside the hut, the stove was glowing pink with the heat, and wispy steam was just beginning to show near the kettles. And near Grace. She was standing close to it, wrapped in one of Grease’s shirts. She faced the stove, her back to the door, and me and as far as I could make out she was holding the front of the shirt open, gathering in the heat the stove pumped out. From five beds came snores and sleep noises at an acceptable level: Marty was asleep fully clothed under his, his body convulsing periodically with erotic shudders. My opening the door let in frozen air, and Grace turned.

Photoflash.

This image lasted maybe a millisecond, and burned itself on to my memory forever: a pretty girl with a snub nose, not tall, my height, say, which is five two; dark hair rested on her shoulders; small breasts with big, uneven nipples and some freckles. She had freckles on her belly too, and her patch of pubic hair was dark, dense and very small. She even had a scattering of freckles on her thighs. And she smiled a lopsided cheeky girl grin that stopped your breath. It was like standing in front of a magnet. Is that what they mean by beauty? Was it anything to do with the fact that Grace was the first naked woman I’d ever met in daylight?

Her voice was a hoarse stage whisper. ‘What are you like in the mornings?’

Hey; I can come on with the smart phrases too. I mouthed, rather than said, ‘I’m a bit of a morning person,’ and tried to return her crooked smile with one of my own, attempting to sound as nonchalant as Charles Boyer, but it didn’t work. I must have looked like a schoolboy with the twitch.

Grace was fast asleep in the crook of my arm by the time the others began to stir. I was warm and comfortable, and didn’t welcome the morning chorus of farts and curses which signalled waking airmen getting chocks away before levering themselves upright. Someone had put the radio on: Fred Astaire sang that ‘it was a lovely day to get caught in the rain’.

Fergal thrust his face through the partition curtains and said, ‘Christ, Skipper, she’s worn you down, you’re no bigger than the Sparks!’ Then he asked, ‘What’s the met, Charlie?’

‘Fine and clear outside, and bloody freezing. It’ll be a good weekend.’

‘Where’s the Skip?’

‘On finals. Bloody running. Don’t wake Grace.’

He nodded at her, and asked, ‘Will Grease be all right about this?’

‘Yes he will,’ replied Grace, without opening her eyes.

‘What about me then?’ from Fergal again, whose grin was wasted on Grace, because she wasn’t looking.

‘Wait your bloody turn,’ she said, and pulled the blankets over her head.

Grease’s Red Indian motorbike had had a sidecar for the last fortnight. Piotr had found it; we didn’t ask him where. After Pete had washed, shaved and carefully combed his hair, he set off on it to the kitchens, with a carton of American cigarettes tucked into the open top of his battledress jacket. He returned with the makings of eight breakfasts which we cooked on two shallow baking tins balanced on the stove, and a squadron-sized urn of tea which we waxed with Polish vodka. In fact the sidecar was so full of food that we had to store some. Grease returned, stripped off outside, and emptied the ice-cold contents of the fire bucket over himself. He steamed in the cold sun momentarily, before rubbing himself down.

Grace glanced at his cold shrivelled prick and snorted, ‘If I had known that’s what it looked like last night, I wouldn’t have bothered!’

Grease replied, ‘Maybe it needs warming up.’

‘Then stick it on the stove with the other sausages.’

Between Bawne and St Neots, there’s a fair-sized village named Crifton. Grace told us that her father and stepmother owned most of it, and Crifton Park, the estate around it, and most of the farms between Crifton and the next airfield at Gransden. She asked us to stay for the weekend. Seven unplanned-for semi-domesticated guests wouldn’t be a problem, apparently. Somehow it was decided that only Grease, Marty and the Toff would go with her: Fergal, Conroy, me and the Pink Pole would head for the Smoke. Fergal volunteered to fiddle travel warrants for us, and Piotr surprised us by tossing a set of keys to Grease and saying, ‘You take the car.’

Grease asked, ‘What car?’ Not an unreasonable question.

‘Ours. It was Abbot’s. He missed the bus yesterday. I will take the money to his widow.’

‘I didn’t know that he was married,’ Conroy said.

‘No. Neither did the RAF. No permission. It is better I give the money to his widow. Less embarrassment.’

It was a small, four-seat open Singer: at a push you could get a full crew of seven into it. I know that because that was what Abbot and his people used to do. They would drive up to their aircraft dispersal, and leave it there until they got back from the trip. I recalled, then, that I had noticed it standing forlorn in an empty revetment as Tuesday’s Child had taxied in. I suppose that no one had since wanted to move it, just in case. That was just the sort of thing that wouldn’t worry the Pole.

Before we split, Grace found she had something to say. She had her smart little uniform on again – without the jacket yet – and had her smart little bum facing the stove, one high altar of our little hut warming another. She cleared her throat as if she was embarrassed, which embarrassed us, so we stopped stuffing bags with shirts, shaving kit and condoms and listened.

‘We have seven or eight Lancs to deliver here, all from Ringway. That’s usually about one a week. I can probably get them all. They offer you most of the flights anywhere near your home. It’s the way we do things in the ATA – there aren’t many other perks. That way you get to see your family, if you want to. I wondered if I could count on your spare berth now and again for the duration . . . although I’ll always go on to Crifton if I’m in the way, and you can come on with me if you like.’ She sounded oddly uncertain; as if she was unused to asking for favours. That was disconcerting.

The Toff jumped in before the rest of us, and killed the gentle smile on her face stone dead. ‘We don’t have a spare berth,’ he said.

Grace said, ‘Oh,’ and her mouth went round, then turned down at the edges. Put down. Her cheeks coloured.

Then Toff said, ‘We just have a spare bed called Grace’s Place. You can have that if you want.’

Grace blushed: the one and only time. Grace kissed everyone in turn, starting with the Toff. I thought that the kisses she gave to Grease and me were not as sexy as those she stuck on the others. Always you learn. Looking back forty years it’s hard to tell if we ever fell in love with her: if we did it must have started about then.

By late afternoon on Saturday we were at the bar of the Trocadero, and halfway to drunk. On the tiny dance floor I had a couple of dances with some American Red Cross girls, who were pretty and able, but definitely not willing. It made you understand why the Yanks went mad for British women; their own are born with their knees tied together. So we stayed in the bar after that. We had taken a taxi from the station to Green’s, where we always tried to stay: it was a bomber hotel. Then we dumped our kit and made straight for the Troc, because we’d scored there before. We couldn’t get tickets for a show, and didn’t fancy queuing in the cold for returns, so it was supper somewhere, and then clubs or pubs. Maybe a dance; if they’d let us in.

Somewhere along the evening we lost our tail gunner, and merged with an American crew from the 306th at Thurleigh. That was near Bawne. Neighbours. They were taking a bit of a beating, but you didn’t talk shop to strangers when you were on leave. In the bar of the Bag O’Nails club, after we tossed a couple of stroppy fighter types on to the pavement, we ploughed across the furrows of the same American Red Cross girls from the Troc. The Yanks gave them the treatment. We remembered the score, and didn’t come on to them. So they came on to us, and I woke up with a plump little redhead.

After I had washed and shaved and dressed in clean clothes, and breakfasted alone because the others didn’t show, I felt kind of flat. Fergal and Conroy surfaced for beer at lunchtime, and after that it was pretty certain to be pubs and bars all the way to Monday night.

Conroy voiced what I had been thinking. He looked up from the book he was reading – he always read and got drunk at the same time: this time it was Juvenal, I remember – and observed, ‘If there’s an afternoon train we could be back in the pub in Eltisley by tonight, and drop down a surprise visit on the bike to this Crifton place on Monday. What was it they were doing then?’

‘Impromptu shoot,’ said Fergal. ‘Apparently her old man likes shooting things.’

‘Like the Pole,’ I said. ‘Where is he by the way?’

‘Sloped off from the Troc early. Said he was going to pay Abbot’s widow. He’ll find his own way back.’

‘Always does,’ Conroy said.

In the train that afternoon I thought that Grace had stepped out of an aircraft, and changed everything. That’s what I thought. Conners asked me what she was like. I told him, ‘I don’t know. You turn your back, and when you look again she’s become someone else.’

‘I know what you mean, but I’m not going to complain.’

‘Neither am I,’ Fergal said. ‘Gift horse.’ There was something about the way he said it that made me wonder if he was even less experienced with women than I was.

I said, ‘Maybe she’s her own woman.’

Conners winced, and looked at me as if I had gone mad, then turned away and lit up without offering them round.

I know a little about architecture because the art teacher at my grammar school in Surrey found a few lessons spare at the end of my last term, and gave us a quick gallop through the history of architecture. It meant that I could name shapes, and Crifton Park House is Palladian. The drive to it started in the village. As you burst out of the trees and into the light you found the house in front and slightly below you, doglegged about another half mile further on. It was a two-storeyed mansion as big as an aircraft carrier. I could have fitted my parent’s old three-bedroomed semi into the portico alone. Fergal steered for that: Conroy was on the pillion, and I occupied the sidecar. Fergal wasn’t terribly good at motorbikes, but he was better than either of us.

When he pulled up, with a slither that took a stripe a foot deep out of their gravel, he spoke for us all. ‘Strewth. Fuckingham Palace! Are we at the right place?’

A gravel path as wide as a runway, which appeared to surround the house, was dotted with elephant-sized grey urns sitting on plinths. They hosted great trailing falls of geraniums, splashed red. Red is a colour I had come to dislike since joining up.

There was a gardener working at one of them, at the top of a wooden set of steps. I crunched up to him. He looked down and gave me an uncertain smile. He wasn’t badly dressed for a working gardener, partly hidden by a huge leather apron. It was huge, because it fitted him, and he was. He must have had four inches on Grease, which would have made him six five at least, and he was heavy with it. His face was a hunting and shooting brown, and topped with a fringe of white hair, through which his pate climbed. That was brown as well. He carefully wiped his hands against the apron and stepped down. He held one hand out to shake – mine, thinly bandaged fingers and all, disappeared inside it. He bent slightly to meet me. He said, ‘Fuckingham Palace. Very original. I must take that man’s name. He could write some of my speeches for me.’ He scrutinized my battledress trade flash and said, ‘You’re the sparks.’

He didn’t sound like a gardener to me, so I responded with, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m Peter Baker. My people make some of the bullets your people fire at Germans. Have you got time to look at my radio? I salvaged it from a B17 that made a mess of my long ride, and I’m trying to get it going again.’

‘I’ll have a look at it, but won’t make any promises. I don’t build the things, I just twiddle the knobs, talk into them and rattle away with the Morse key. America is another country as far as radios go; a lot of things in their sets work back to front.’

‘Come to see my Grace?’

‘That was the idea, sir.’

‘She’s off shooting with your skipper and your gunner. The one with the limp.’

‘We call him the Toff.’

‘See why. He speaks the language better than most. Anyway – you’ve time to give my wireless the once over before lunch?’

‘Absolutely, sir,’ and I waved the other two over. Safe landing. Good touchdown.

He walked fast. In a bloody great house like that you’d have to or starve to death between meals. He dropped Fergal and Conroy in a library the size of a railway station chapel, with bottles of beer at their elbows, and then led me north, west and up to a small room in a corner of the building.

‘Servant’s room,’ he observed. ‘Used to have dozens in the 1800s I’d say. Room enough for a battalion of them. I get by with six – all too old for the services or war work.’

‘What about the estate? The land?’

‘I unretired the last estate manager, and gave him a dozen land girls. He thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. Treats them like a ruddy harem, and works to the government’s plans, not mine – but we get enough off the top to feed the place without straining the local black market.’

There was a bed with a striped mattress as old as the house, two hard chairs, a shelf with several books – some about radio telegraphy, and one on astronomy – and a table bearing a standard US bomber radio with a battered case. There were WD charts pinned to the walls: the Western Approaches and the whole of Europe.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘Most of the bits are here. Where’s the aerial off to?’ The thick lead climbed up through a skylight window.

‘One of the chimneys. All right?’

‘Should be.’ I went through three induction circuits. On. On. On. Valves lit, and I began to smell that warm, friendly electrical scent of an excited radio. Then static. Well; so what? After Krefeld I spoke static fairly fluently.

‘This might take me some time.’

‘No problem, Sparks.’ Then he said, ‘Look; I can’t keep calling you Sparks. You have a name?’

‘Charlie Bassett.’

‘Charlie then?’

‘That’s fine.’

‘I’m Peter.’

‘That’s fine too. Our tail gunner, the Pink Pole, is a Peter too; only it’s “Piotr” – the Polish way of saying it.’

‘I’ll leave you to it then. Lunch at one, OK? Can you find your own way down?’

‘I’ll follow the smell of food until I get there.’

‘If you get thirsty try the bag at your feet. Bye for now: I appreciate this,’ he said, and moved out. Quiet and quick on his feet for a big man. The bag I hadn’t noticed was an old doctor’s case. It contained a bottle of bourbon, and a thick glass tumbler.

I worked for an hour, but got further down the bottle than the radio. I’d come back in a week, if he still wanted me to. I found Fergal in the library with paper spread around a writing desk, and three empty bottles of Angers beer. He waved me away, and said, ‘He has to give a speech at the Manchester Trades next week, and wants me to liven up what he’s written. Conroy’s helping him in the garden. They were talking poetry.’ As I left him he added, ‘Grease is around somewhere. He stinks of gunpowder and dead things.’

Grease was cleaning a shotgun in a spare kitchen. He was surrounded by heaps of dead birds. You could see the feather dust dancing in the rays of light admitted by high windows. I asked what the birds had been. He said, ‘Those are snipe, and those are woodcock. That heap are grouse, and those are pheasant. The big thing is a swan that the Toff took against. Great isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure. What happens to them now?’

‘Folk eat them. The Boss will have woodcock or snipe tonight.’

‘The Boss?’

‘Grace’s dad. Met him yet?’ I nodded. Seeing Grease reduced to man-the-mighty-hunter, and surrounded by bird corpses had temporarily robbed me of sensible speech . . . but silence didn’t worry him. Grease asked, ‘You want the good news or the bad news?’

‘Good news.’

‘Grace is one of the best bloody deflection shots you’ve ever seen in your life. She tumbled most of these birds.’ What was good about that?

‘Tumbled. She didn’t tumble these birds, she bloody massacred them. This was Custer’s Last Stand for birds.’

‘You must have pulled a girl in town,’ Grease said quickly, ‘because you’ve come back picky. You’re always picky when you’ve scored.’

‘What’s the bad news?’

‘The Toff’s off sulking somewhere. Won’t talk to anyone. Grace is a bloody sight better shot half pissed than he’ll ever be sober. He can’t stand the competition.’

We ate lunch in a huge kitchen: eight at the table – Marty mooched in from the fields; he’d met a land army girl who was teaching him to plough. He smelled strongly of warm horse, or eau de land girl. It wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. The Toff looked quite low. Grace sat at one end of the table – furthest from me – and her father at the other. Kitchen or no, the lunch was still served to us, although the staff looked so far gone I thought that I should be waiting on them.

The Boss read my mind. He said, ‘Don’t say it, lad. You get shot at most nights, so let them do their bit – there’d be a revolt if I tried to retire them now.’

‘Have they been with you long?’

‘Since ’36. That’s when I arrived. They were already here. They’ve more right to be here than we have.’

Lancashire hotpot. A real one. Huge hunks of fleshy mutton under carrots and onions, and crisp slices of potato over a thin layer of mash. At some point between that, and the bread pudding with custard which chased it, Grease blinked owlishly several times and said, ‘I think our Charlie became an ace last night. I think he dipped his wick in the wicked city. He’s come back early, and very picky.’

‘What makes one an ace?’ the Boss asked.

‘Two shags with two different girls on two consecutive days.’ That’s the Toff, coming out of it at last.

No one asked me who the first of the two had been, but Grace was suddenly looking at me.

‘What was she like?’ she asked.

I think I probably looked at my plate as I said, ‘An American girl, from Bedford. She was . . . an enthusiast, I suppose.’

Grace sniffed and looked away. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘one of those.’

After lunch broke up I took an enormous mug of tea to the front of the house, and sat under one of the windows in the sun on a stone bench made for giants. The sun on my face felt precious. Grace’s father, who everybody else seemed to be calling the Boss now, strolled up. He had a black curved briar pipe dwarfed by his hand. At first he sat without speaking – the tobacco he smoked smelled sweet and rich. Then he asked, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Making memories. Things to think about when you’re scared.’

‘Good idea. I wished I’d made more when I was your age. We were a nice little middle-class group then. Me and my partner. Comfortably off and respectable.’

‘How did that lead to this?’ I waved at the house stretching away on each side of us.

‘Bullets breed bullets. The Germans may have stopped fighting in 1918, but nobody else did. Nice little wars absolutely ruddy everywhere, all needing bullets. That kept us ticking over. I took over from dad in 1926, just after his first stroke. I took a pal in with me. He had contacts, and was good at numbers, but it didn’t work out in the long run. Soon after that there was all the fuss about Afghanistan and the RAF, and they needed millions of .303s for that one . . . and then someone began to agitate about rearming. Probably Winston, he was always keen on wars. Baker and Baker couldn’t lose, could it? There was no point in not moving with the times – so I expanded into gun barrels and liners as well. If you buy my gun barrels, then you’re going to buy my bullets to go with them, aren’t you?’

His pipe had gone out. He made a production of relighting it, and added, ‘More than 3,000 employees now, and two great factories just outside Durham to keep them in. Wealthier than ever, and never stop bloody working.’

‘What happened to your partner?’

‘Died. Sad. I never wanted that to happen.’

‘You moved here in ’36, sir?’

‘Had to do something with all the bloody money we were making, didn’t I?’

It was a very good moment, sitting with the old man like that. Then Conroy ambled along, and changed things. He could be a cuss when he wanted to be. As soon as he opened his mouth I knew that he had something he was going to pursue. He asked Baker, ‘Can I ask you about Grace, sir?’

‘You’d be better off asking her wouldn’t you?’

‘She may not know the answers.’

We could see Grace and the Toff in the half distance, on the margins of the slope the Boss called his Long Ride. I saw her catch his hand in hers, and they veered off to one side and tree cover. They were probably going to discuss deflection shooting. Baker puffed at the small fire he had created in his pipe, and didn’t give Conroy another chance. He said, ‘Don’t ask me about Grace’s relationships with men. All you need to know is that she is as straight about them as she is about everything, except the big lie.’

‘What’s the big lie?’ I asked.

‘Ask Grace.’ Then he turned back to Conners with, ‘Don’t try to complicate her; nor yourself, come to that. Right?’

‘Yes, sir. I was thinking about the crew. Worried, if you like . . .’

‘Bollocks. You were just clearing your decks.’

Conroy smiled. I’ve seen him use his smile before. He defuses difficult situations with it. ‘Maybe that as well.’ He stood up, threw us a sloppy salute and wandered off.

I sat in silence with the old man for a few minutes, and then he said, ‘That boy thinks too much.’

Then we talked radios until the sun began to dip.

Grease and I didn’t stay to supper, but we stayed for a drink before they ate. Grace’s stepmother still hadn’t appeared. Grace had a couple of small leaves in her hair. The Toff was talking animatedly again, although it was about gunnery, and Conroy had books in his hands. Fergal had to be dragged down from the library: he had completely rewritten the Free Trades speech and wanted us to test it for him. Under his guidance it seemed to be recommending the union of the two Irelands as an independent country. I’m sure that it hadn’t started out that way.

Our Eltisley pub was crammed that night. No flying, although it had been a good weekend for it. Dasher – he was another Canadian pilot who had been on the same conversion course as Grease – told us that no one had flown since we left. A big stand down. He called it a ‘jumbo scrub’, and gave me a cynical glance when I asked him why.

‘Not enough crew or kites, are there? Too many new faces at the bar, and the aircraft we have left are being overflown just to keep bombs in the air: they’re falling to bits on us. They say that Butch gave the CO six days off to effectively put a new squadron together. On my last trip I was the fourth consecutive pilot to sign for the bastard aeroplane.’

Butch, or the Butcher was the name we gave our chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. That’s what the press thought, anyway. After the war they called him Bomber Harris didn’t they? In 1944 I heard him called other things.

‘Which was that?’

‘Queenie. Won’t do it again – we burned the old bitch on Coldharbour Farm on the way back in I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’

‘No worries, as our Australian brethren say; we all got out. What about you?’

‘Grease left pieces of our old Yorker all over Germany. We left the bits we brought back at Manston.’

‘Wizard new runway at Manston I hear.’

‘Yeah, wizard. Even Grease can get down in one piece on it.’

Grease got Mrs Harrison, the landlady, to open up the small bar for us: he wanted to talk, and we couldn’t hear each other over the aircrew and WAAFs around us. The small bar was just that. It was about six feet square and contained a round table carved with hundreds of names and initials, and polished by a thousand elbows in service cloth. Later we would have to make way for an airman and his girl – it was always in demand late evening. Two uncomfortable upright chairs left just enough room for two people and their drinks. I once spent an hour reading the table. A WAAF named Helen seemed to figure on it too frequently for chance. If she was that unlucky with her choice of partner she was a lady to avoid.

Grease started by saying, ‘That’s a pity.’

‘What is?’

‘Squadron stand down. I thought that old Bushes was being kind to us, giving us an extra few days’ leave. Looks like the whole of the flying side got them. It’ll mean that our six weeks start here, before we get any more.’

We were given six days’ leave at the end of every six weeks’ flying. Some squadrons were awarded nine every six weeks – it was the luck of the draw I suppose. We had already done three weeks, so Grease had been hoping we’d just picked up a buckshee five days, and would have only flown another three weeks before another six.

I said, ‘I’ll do the sums, but I think that we’re still ahead. We got leave early, that was all, and if we get the chop in the next three weeks we wouldn’t have had any at all.’

‘I’ll think of that as we’re spinning in with flames shooting out of our arses.’

‘What did you want to talk about anyway?’

‘Grace.’

‘Not you too! Conroy was on about her to the old boy this afternoon. What a tit!’

‘What did the old man say?’

‘Something like, “Shag her as much as you want to, but don’t come crying to me about it if it all goes wrong.” I don’t think that he gives a damn. With a bit of luck Conners and Fergal will satisfy their curiosity by tomorrow morning, and that will leave Pete. Then maybe we can get back to thinking about flying, and staying alive for our thirty trips.’

Grease pulled at his top lip. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be quite as simple as that, Charlie,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you satisfied with getting a new kite, a free shag, and a weekend’s accommodation out of it – what more do you want?’

‘Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t gone soft on her or anything, any more than you have, I just like her around. I think that I just like her around more than anyone else I’ve met.’

‘And she’s a good shag.’

‘Yes . . . that too; she’s a very good shag, isn’t she? It seems like too much of a good thing. Do you think that we were chopped over Krefeld, and have gone to bomber heaven?’

‘There are no Lancasters in heaven. Not even Yorker.’

‘Anyway, we’ll see what happens when she flies the next one down from Ringway. I’ve just had a very depressing thought.’

‘What’s that, old son?’

‘There’s a joint services parachute training school at Ringway. I bet she’s good at that too.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘Do I mind what?’

‘That Grace spreads it about a bit. That she’s not always with you?’ I was asking him about myself, as much as about him.

He pulled at his lip again. ‘No. I know that’s a bit odd; but no, I don’t.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘You’re too young to know better. I should.’

He grinned, and swilled his pint down. I copied him. We talked until an American airman and a very pretty WAAF put their heads around the door, then stood up and made way for them. Normally that would have irritated me momentarily – seeing a happy guy with a nice girl, when I hadn’t one of my own. That didn’t matter any more, and just like Grace’s earlier flash of jealousy, that was quite interesting.

Bushes’ hairy and unexpected face beamed at us across the crowded main bar. He belched and said, ‘See you tomorrow lads.’

He did, too. Grease and I took the bike out to dispersal to see Tuesday’s Child – she must have been diverted from a Canadian order, because she had that satin finish paint which the Canadian squadrons favoured, and gleamed under a weak sun. One of the ground crew had painted TUESDAY’S CHILD in neat small yellow capitals under the small window just aft of the bomb-aimer’s bubble, and GREASE just under the sliding window to the pilot’s left shoulder. She had been given the squadron code, and her individual code letter Y. I have to admit it; she looked a good one. Bushes was bawling out the ground crew chief, who bore the rasping sentences like a stoic. One of the armourers was working at the machine guns in the front turret, above the bubble. He grinned when he saw us, and moved his left fist up and down in the international call sign. When Bushes noticed us he shouted, ‘Look at the bloody paint. It’s as shiny as a pimp’s Lagonda!’

‘That’s not the Chief’s fault,’ from Grease, ‘it came like that.’

‘They’ve had four bloody days to paint it with our flat paint!’

‘Not if you want its acceptance checks completed, the compasses serviced, and guns in it. What are they like by the way, Chiefy?’

‘Great Mr McKenzie. Baker barrels: beautifully machined – they’ll never let you down.’

Grease said to me, ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’

‘What does that mean?’ Bushes asked.

‘The ATA who flew it in, sir. She’s Baker’s daughter. That’s Bullets Baker the bullet maker – he’s diversified into gun barrels apparently.’

Hurt always showed on Bushes’ face immediately – it was as if it turned itself inside out momentarily. He did that now. ‘And how’d the hell you know that, when I didn’t?’

‘We just spent the weekend at his place, sir.’

‘Fucking hooray.’ Bushes glared at Grease and Chiefy in turn. Then he said to me, ‘I spoke to the squadron radio officer about your call sign. Can’t be Yorker. Yorker has gone to the knackers. She survives as bits in the spares boxes of thieves like the Chief here. I thought Y-Yoke would do. OK?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That’s all right then.’ Then he turned on Grease again. ‘You’d better air test it as soon as the remains of your crew crawl back from the brothels they lost themselves in. Tell the watch office I said so.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Grease, who threw him a peculiar slow salute, but a salute even so. It was a polite way of telling him to sod off, to let us get on with the work. Bushes could take a hint. Some sentient officers could. We were standing close to the port main undercarriage wheel – which was as big as us, if you must know – and Grease asked, ‘What do you think of her.’

Chiefy said, ‘Absolute fucking corker, Grease – just make sure your people look after her. It almost seems a shame to take her to Germany.’

‘Maybe they’ll let me fly a war bonds tour around the Dominions instead.’

‘Fat chance of that lad; we’ve got to be up to operational strength by Thursday or Friday. Mr and Mrs Fritz must be missing your visits.’

Grease wanted some wakey-wakey pills from the MO, and I wanted my fingers signed off, so the medical unit was the next stop, and there was no problem. In the roadway outside there was. We were suddenly confronted by two flight lieutenants and a sergeant – I recognized them as all being from the same crew. The sergeant was a sunny Yorkshireman – a rear gunner, like the Pole, but the smaller of the FLs was a pugnacious sod of a pilot: one of those universally loathed VCs-in-waiting, provided he lived that long. Gerry Brookman. Everything about him spoke confrontation – especially the way he stood in front of us now, legs apart, fists on hips, cap pushed back. If I had still been in the school playground I would have been running in circles by now, yelling Fight! Fight!

As it was he spat, ‘Look here, Mr McKenzie. How come you get the brand new kite, whilst the squadron officers are soldiering on with the old tat we started with? I don’t know what stroke you pulled, but whatever it was, you’d better watch your step.’ His voice rose an octave with each syllable, it seemed, until he sounded as if his voice hadn’t yet broken: it spoiled the effect.

‘Mortified FL,’ said Grease, ‘I’m sure,’ and stood there towering above him like Mount McKinley. FL was service slang for French letters or rubber johnnies: maybe I already told you that. It really pissed the officers off if we abbreviated their rank and title.

Brookman went red in the face: a vein throbbed at his temple. ‘See here—’

‘No Brookie. You see here. Butt out of our business, and we’ll keep out of yours. Get your own new kite. You do that by bringing your own one back with wounded on board, and so many bits missing that it’s flying on farts and last night’s funk.’ Grease poked Brookman in the chest with a broad forefinger, which pushed him back a yard, ‘. . . and if you care to take this any further, the next time I see your kite over the other side I’ll order my gunners to shoot you down. Unlike the shite that flies with you, they’ll do it.’

As we walked away I said, ‘You really haven’t any idea of squadron or wing, or bloody RAF, or discipline, come to that, have you Grease? As far as you’re concerned it’s just the crew; there’s no one else.’

‘That’s right boy, seven of us against the rest of the world. Eight, if you count Grace.’

I wished he hadn’t said that.