The Kiel Canal

Bushes told us not to worry, because the trip wasn’t on until the next day, this was just a preliminary briefing – who’d ever heard of one of them before? The job was on in the next twenty-four hours, and it would be briefed properly. He just wanted our views. I hadn’t heard of that before either. If democracy was putting down root among the officer corps it was going to be a more difficult war than I imagined. The operations board had just three aircraft on it, and there was a table covered with a black cotton sheet he had the six of us stand around. There was me and Grease, and Quelch and his mid-upper gunner, a grave Jamaican with prematurely greying hair (mine would be too if I had had to fly regularly with Quelch) who was called Francis or Francie. He was a great drinker. The nav from Bushes’ regular crew, a Scot named Murray, was there as well.

Bushes looked at us, and barked at the skips, ‘Didn’t either of you think to bring your navigators?’

Quelch shrugged. ‘Francis doesn’t usually get to see the maps; I thought that it would be a treat for him, sir.’

Francis’s teeth lit his face with a smile. He wasn’t pleased; he just thought that it was very funny. He was a quiet man with a cultured speaking voice when he could be bothered to speak at all; his father was a doctor with a pricy general practice in Wigmore Street, and Francis was a Classics First. He found most things very funny, particularly the English. This didn’t win him many friends, and he got into a fair number of scraps. Quelch said that he was a ropey gunner, and mad with it. Privately I agreed with Quelchy and suspected that he was the maddest of the lot.

‘Ours refused to come. He says he doesn’t do maps this early in the day,’ I said.

‘He’ll do what we fucking well tell him.’

‘You tell him that sir; he’ll probably listen to you.’ That was Grease.

When Murray pulled the black cloth clear and kicked it under the table we forgave Bushes’ testiness immediately.

A large-scale map of eastern England and northern Germany was pinned to the table: a single red line on it connected a small airfield in Cambridgeshire, Bawne, with a port in northern Germany.

‘Fucking Kiel,’ breathed Grease. ‘The fucking bastards.’

There was no red line showing the return trip; maybe they didn’t think we’d need one.

‘. . . and you haven’t heard the worst of it yet,’ mumbled the squadron leader. ‘They want us to piss all over the Kraut in public.’

Quelch said quietly, ‘Explain please. Sir.’

‘We’re gardening at the end of the Kiel canal, and they want them to see us doing it. The idea is that if we’re seen mining the entrance to the canal it will back up the canal traffic for a couple of days, while they sweep the channels. Which is just what is required, apparently.’

‘Smack my doggie!’ said Quelch. I think that the phrase must have meant something quite different in the circles in which he moved. In technical terms I thought that this was a precision job for maniacs. I mean other squadrons’ maniacs.

‘We are not the bleedin’ Dambusters. Why don’t they ask them?’ I said.

‘Apparently they’re not too good at bombing water. Things sticking out of the water they can manage, but not water itself.’

You’ve heard the phrase you could have heard a pin drop, of course: well, after the initial skirmish no one wanted to be the first to speak. Then Quelch said, ‘I’ve been to Kiel before, sir. It’s the most heavily defended port in Germany. Worse than Hamburg.’

‘The interesting thing is,’ said Bushes, ‘some silly bugger in ops obviously thinks that we can avoid Kiel itself, and just overfly the sea locks.’

‘Would they care to come with us? Do you know that they don’t even bother to have too much flak around the canal basin itself – they just have three enormous armoured flak ships moored outside it. With us down on the deck, trying to fly between them, they’ll mince us. It will be like the Charge of the Light Brigade.’

‘Will it, though?’ I asked them.

I had an idea: sergeants are allowed them, occasionally. This was one of mine. Have you ever had one of those scary moments when every open eye in a room looks at you? I spoke to Bushes. Might as well shoot at the top, if you’re going to shoot at all.

‘You tried to make us laugh by saying 617 couldn’t bomb the sea if they tried, sir. Have you ever bombed the sea?’

Bushes growled. ‘I fail to understand.’ Then, ‘What do you mean, imp?’ as if his first four words had been too difficult for me.

‘We actually bombed the sea on our third trip. We were already over the German border when the entire second force was recalled, and us with it. I remember it, because it counted as a trip even though we didn’t bomb anyone. The whole mob of us had to ditch our bombs into the bomb box.’ The bomb box was a designated jettison area of the English Channel. ‘Fish-killing on a grand scale. I came up to the office to watch them. So did the nav.’

‘And?’

‘Have you ever seen a cookie explode at sea level? The shock wave is enormous. It’s a very spectacular sight – like a small tidal wave running out concentrically, and fast, from the blast. Then there’s the blast effect itself: imagine being down there inside it. What about somebody lobbing a couple of cookies between the flak ships, say two minutes before we arrive at a hundred feet? If they’re still floating they won’t have got over the shock before we’re through them and away. The gunners can add to it by hosing them as we pass.’

Grease breathed out a long sigh and said, ‘Give the little man a coconut.’

Bushes said, ‘I’ll put that up,’ and to his nav, ‘You can give us a route back now, Murray. We may even need one.’

‘Better make that a dotted line. Now there’s only fighters to worry about,’ Q muttered.

Outside, I asked Grease, ‘Mind if I lose myself for an hour or so? Someone will have to watch out for Pete when he wakes up. He has an odd look about him at the moment, even when he’s asleep.’

‘Someone’ll do it. Where you going?’

‘Over to Crifton – not to the house, although I could always call in and see if the Yanks left me a box of bits for the Boss’s radio. Someone I nearly met. This time I’ll do the job properly.’

‘Stop being mysterious young Charles. Just say bint.’

‘Bint, then.’

‘Good for you. I’m pleased you’ve got the knack of it at last. I was worried when you met Quelch down the Drift.’

‘That was a chance. A mischance. I’ve found out that I like girls.’

‘Good for Grace, then. Tally-ho, as the fighter jocks would say.’

‘Tally-ho.’

I didn’t tell him that it was nothing to do with Grace. He could work that one out for himself.

No one had plans for the Singer, and Piotr was still out cold and snoring, so there was no reason not to use it. I was at the Crifton Post Office and Telephone Exchange thirty minutes later. A small bell chimed over the door as I stepped in. A woman’s voice without a body to go with it called out, ‘I’m sorry; we’re closed. I’ve cashed up.’

Same voice, anyway. If she turned out to be ugly I still had room to bank to port, and get out at low level. She was behind the high, dark wood counter, bent away from me, and fumbling with the levers on a heavy old dark green safe. She straightened up still turned away. Young. Yeah. That’s what I had thought: she wore a cream cotton summer dress that flared gradually to the knee: it was printed with faded red flowers, and looking forward from the tail I could see that most of the right pieces seemed there. A good solid flier, I thought; probably not too aerobatic. Not too tall; ruddy bronzy hair bleached by the sun, and worn in some sort of a roll or pinned up in a bunch – it would darken as the days shortened, like my sister’s did.

‘I almost hoped that you’d say that,’ I said, and she swung on me.

‘I know your voice.’

‘Good. I know yours too.’

‘But we haven’t met?’

‘If we had, I’d have married you.’

Laughs. Tinkling sound. Like sleigh bells.

‘You’d have been too late: I did that in 1939. You’re the RAF boy who phoned the Americans a few days ago.’

‘You’re right. That was me. I couldn’t resist a look. Do you mind?’

Behind the creaky little post office she had a small kitchen sitting room, with a solid fuel stove, a square table and two chairs, and a couple of cupboards. There were also two utility armchairs, which had seen better days, either side of a cabinet radio on a side table. The room was deliciously warm; I needed to unbutton my battledress top immediately.

Sometime early she told me that her husband was also a sergeant: a tank commander captured near Tobruk. Before the war he had been Crifton’s youngest postmaster, but had been in the bag, first in Italy and then Germany, since 1942. She wasn’t keen on the Yanks, she told me, because they made all the moves. I didn’t know what she meant, but she had her back to me whilst she juggled an old black kettle between the hotplates of the stove. I was thinking of some moves of my own. You could have played a fiddle on the crackling power in the air between us. She stood facing away from me most of the time, fiddling with the kettle, which seemed reluctant to boil. Not like me. We talked for a while about this and that, before it was time to fly or die.

I walked up behind her, slid my arms around her waist, and pulled her against me. She gave a sharp intake of breath, but then carried on talking as if I was still a mile away. She talked about keeping the post office and shop going herself, and finding that she was better at it than her husband had been: there was a little nest egg waiting in the bank for them when he returned. I kissed her neck where her hair turned up into its loose roll. Each time I kissed her she would pause between sentences, and then scurry on. Like a murmur, like a breeze. I breathed in her smell, which was fine and vague and resinous: pine trees. The Yanks, she said, thought women could be bought. They didn’t know English women.

I said, ‘I love your hair, and I love your neck,’ and kissed the nape of her neck. Her skin was so pale that my lips left a faint red mark.

‘Oh,’ she said. It was a small noise. I was sure that it wasn’t a no, so I slid my hands down to her thighs and gently began to inch her dress up. About then she stopped gibbering altogether. My heart was pounding too hard for me to be able to speak at all, so she had done well to get this far. She suddenly twisted round towards me, and then held me, hard enough to squeeze the breath away from me. She spoke in a low voice, her eyes not meeting mine: I was learning that that was what women sometimes did.

‘Let’s have that cuppa afterwards.’

When I finally had time to look at her I couldn’t help setting it against my picture of Grace, who I had thought freckled, but who had but a few lazy splashes of them by comparison.

‘Who were you thinking of, just then?’ Susan asked.

‘You. I love the freckles on your body.’ I leaned over and kissed her navel, and let my tongue linger. I tasted her salt.

‘Liar.’

Her hair had partly come down. She pulled out the remaining pins and it fell around her shoulders. Her face lost its lightness, and she settled back in the big pillows and closed her eyes.

‘Who are you thinking about?’ I asked her.

‘Sam. I tried to think of his face as I came, but I lost it just at that moment.’

‘Does that make you unhappy?’

‘Yes. Rather. More of a betrayal; but it doesn’t matter. That was good, wasn’t it?’ When she spoke again the cloud seemed to have lifted. ‘Do you want to do it again?’

This time she rode on top, like a Hussar on a galloping charger. I think that she’d done that before. I hadn’t. Sam had been a lucky man, until his luck ran out in Africa.

After the second time I said, ‘I can’t believe that that was so easy.’

‘Thank you.’ She gave a low rueful laugh.

I said, ‘No: not you: it. Wanting to go to bed with you, asking you, and then just doing it.’

‘I knew it already. After I put you through to the Americans I warned myself that I would probably go for you if you ever walked through the door; and you just did.’

‘What about the Yanks?’

‘No. I don’t know why. Pride probably: they seem to be able to have whatever or whoever they want. A lot of wives and widows do tricks for them, but I didn’t ever think I needed to. Is another pair of nylons important?’

‘What about the Yanks?’ I asked again.

She sighed, and gave me a black look. That was a first. ‘They flirt; and if they’re good at it, it’s hard to resist coming straight back at them. Sometimes I let them touch me. Then I wait for a two beat, and say, I’m married, and laugh behind my hand when they walk back out to their jeeps all crabbed over. That’s the worst that I’ve done. Until you came along – as soon as you touched me I was finished.’

‘Me too,’ was all I could think of saying. ‘Let’s not talk about it. Can I see you again?’

She made me wait. ‘OK, but not too often. I don’t want talk.’

‘Shall I telephone you?’

‘That would be wise, wouldn’t it?’

I had that feeling again: absurdly pleased with myself. Silly, really. In the car, rolling slowly back over the flat part of Bawne road, I imagined a woman sucking your soul out, and instead of breathing it back into you, breathing it out into the clear, cold air, to be lost forever. Somewhere over Germany maybe.

I caught up with Grease and some of the others at the NCOs’ Poor Bar. There were several recreation shops open to NCOs: this was one of them – it didn’t restrict you to the company of sergeants aircrew. When I walked in Grease and the Toff were on tall stools up against the bar, already three sheets.

‘Remember we’re working tomorrow,’ I said.

Grease said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s cool.’ That was the first time I’d heard those words used that way. He gave me one of those looks – you know, his eyes were focused on me but the alcohol was getting in the way: he took a swing at me whilst I was still six feet away, and fell from his stool.

‘What was that for?’ I asked the Toff.

‘Something to do with the fat guy who runs the kitchens. Apparently one of the girls has broken her arm, and you forgot to remind him of something.’

I bent to help Grease up. Initially he shook me off, but then let me pull him to his feet.

‘Bloody Sparks! Are you my sparky bloody conscience or bloody aren’t you?’

‘No; I’m not,’ I told him. ‘I’m your bloody sparks, that’s all. I can’t help your bad memory.’

‘Tha’ little girl’s got a broken arm now. Fat Guts says she’s fallen down again.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘She’s off home, isn’t she. I asked Fat Guts where she was, and he told me. Bloody smiling he was.’

‘Are you going to do something about it this time?’

‘If you bloody remind me.’

‘We’ll remind each other, Skip. OK?’

‘Yeah; that’s . . . cool.’ He must have just learned the expression.

I walked them both out into the crisp air for an early night. Outside a car slowed to let us cross the road. It was Bushes. He was in the passenger seat, which probably meant that he was too drunk to drive, and his wife was behind the wheel in civvies. You could see her arms. (Our bold pilots, Bushes and Grease: I wondered if Quelch was drunk somewhere, too.) She smiled at Grease and the Toff and didn’t even make eye contact with me. I learned then that a woman you wanted could pull out of you, and blow away all the pleasure from the woman you’d just had, no matter how good she’d been. Cow. Something like that. You know what I mean? Why was it that at exactly that moment I began to think about Grace, and wonder who she was with?

After we went to Kiel the MO was in need of a stress break. He had a nervous breakdown instead.

I was in the dome looking for the fighters that were bound to come after us, and was the first to notice it. I clicked, and said, ‘Skip? It’s Charlie.’

‘OK, Charlie; what is it?’

‘Quelch has lost his top turret. Like it was wiped off.’

‘Speak to him.’

I twinkled to Quelch’s sparks – Quelch was flying on our starboard side, and the Boss on the other, and we were all so close to the deck that swimming was the only other option. I fired up our Aldis lamp and asked him, ‘What’s your situation?’ It was actually the one-letter code the squadron used unofficially, which was ‘Q’.

He twinkled back. ‘Flak. OK.’

His twinkling was slow. I thought that it might have been wrong handed, or maybe he was just out of practice. I turned my back on him, and twinkled that over to the leader’s aircraft. I added that Quelch no longer had a mid-upper turret. What always impressed me about Bushes was his speed of thought: he immediately dropped back behind our twitchy little formation, and then surged up on the other side of Quelch so that we were bracketing him.

I saw the German fighter before anyone else, which made a first. I just happened to be looking aft from the dome.

‘Fighter, Skip, above and dead astern.’

I didn’t shout ‘Corkscrew’, in case he did. You can’t corkscrew anywhere from fifty feet, except into the briny. Almost immediately I felt Tuesday shake as the Pole and the Toff poured .303 shit back at the Kraut. I became aware peripherally that Quelch’s and Bushes’ rear gunners were doing exactly the same. Piotr was shouting something in Polish which sounded extremely filthy, and which must have done the trick because then there was a big white flash: a quick, white wall of water from where the Kraut flew into the sea behind us. The poor sod never even got a shot off at us.

Pete stopped firing immediately. ‘He’s had it,’ he said. I could hear him drawing in great gulps of breath.

Grease hadn’t deviated from his course by a degree. He responded. ‘Good show.’

I ask you: ‘Good show’ – what did he think he sounded like? I found that my hands were shaking, and held to the rim of the dome to stop. Bushes put Quelch into the circuit first, and then us. He did another low, fat circuit himself before coming in, which meant that we were off the runway and on to the track by then, and I had a rare chance of watching my squadron leader landing an aircraft. All those stories we’d heard about his ground crew strengthening his kite’s undercarriage must have been true. He was even worse than Grease at getting back on to the deck: he bounced it like a football, and I reminded myself not to fly with him unless I was ordered. I was standing behind Grease for our landing. It became my place for what was left of our tour, unless I was working. Grease had said, over his shoulder, ‘You can be a good leader without being a good pilot.’

I knew that he was talking about the Boss, but said, ‘You can’t be a good pilot unless you’re good at landings.’

‘But you can still be a leader.’

‘Then there’s even a chance for you, Skip.’

Conners had held Fiver back from Q’s aircraft, but we could see the people clustered around it, and the meat wagon was by the square fuselage door. Quelch slouched over, dragging his heels and leaned into the Morris to bum a cigarette. That wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was to talk to somebody: anybody, that is. There was dried blood on the back of his hand.

As usual, it was me who asked the question. ‘What was it?’

‘A Flak 88 we think. It came in under the sparks, and out through the turret. Just blew it clear away. Francie went with it. He’s in several bits in there.’ This was all delivered in a matter-of-fact, weary voice. If you didn’t know him better you’d think he didn’t care. He blinked, like someone waking from a deep sleep. ‘One of the bits lived for about ten minutes. Told a damned funny story about Don Bradman, but for the life of me I can’t remember it now.’

‘What about Fellowes?’ – that was his sparks.

‘Shrapnel in his bum and legs, I think. He took a knock, and wasn’t with us for a while. That was Henry signalling you. What did you think of his Morse?’ Henry Horsefall was Quelch’s flight engineer – Fergal’s opposite number.

I said, ‘Neat. Very easy to read. He can have my job any day.’

Fergal leaned over to me and said, ‘I should learn how to do a bit of that.’

Grease said, ‘Yeah. Good one.’ Then he said, ‘Sorry about Francie. He was a good type, wasn’t he?’ It was rhetorical, and for us all.

‘Yes,’ Quelch said.

We offered him a lift, but he said that they’d wait for their own transport. Because we’d only used three aircraft the intelligence people had arranged a one-off interrogation for us. They’d pushed twenty-two chairs around two tables angled together, and of course we left two of the chairs empty. I’d seen the empty chairs before, usually in sevens in the mess at breakfast, but for once these got to me. Before I could sit down I picked them up, and placed them against the wall, out of our sight.

There was just one intelligence officer for all of us together – a bent man; in his fifties I’d guess. I remember his long drooping salt-and-pepper moustache, like a Mexican bandit, big, unreadable dark brown eyes, and a languid manner which told you he was a proper bastard. He asked pointed questions, but wrote slowly. That suited us – our brains didn’t seem to be working too fast. It was always like that after a job: either your brain moved at a funereal pace, or it raced like Wolf Barnato at Le Mans – there was no telling.

He had a brown cardboard file cover alongside his writing pad. I read the title upside down: it said Barrett Bombing: Trial. The cookie had been dropped between the flak ships by a volunteer Mossie from a Northampton Pathfinder squadron. Pathfinders could be like that. We over-flew the impact point three minutes later, unloading Marty’s mines and flying through what was left of the shock wave, with seawater falling on us like rain. One of the flak ships had overturned completely. The others didn’t get a gun on us. There was some desultory responsive fire from the shore side, and it was one of these that did for Francie. The last enemy shot of the night, as it turned out.

The four gunners who fired on it were each interested in who was to be credited with the unlucky night fighter. Piotr said, ‘It was a single-engined radial. Must have been a 190.’

Bushes’ gunner disagreed. ‘It was a single all right, but it had a pointed nose. I reckon that it was a late mark 109.’

That didn’t solve the problem of who was going to claim it: nobody liked claiming quarters – I mean, which quarter had you shot down? The tail assembly? The port wing? No.

The Toff came up with a solution; resigning his own claim he said, ‘Francie can have my quarter.’

Quelch’s rear gunner immediately agreed. ‘Mine too.’

That settled it. The letter to Francie’s parents would say that he got his Kraut, before they got him. That was our second fucking gardening trip, and our last. Someone’s got to show the clever sods how to do it the first time.

Trudging out, tired to my bones, I found myself alongside Bushes, and asked him, ‘Excuse me, sir, but what was that Barrett Bombing thing about, on the IO’s file cover?’

‘Your idea, wasn’t it? Gotta call it something. Don’t worry, you’ll only be famous for about a quarter of an hour, until the next one comes along.’

There was a new Lanc in one of the blast bays when we got back, and Grace was asleep in Marty’s bed. They must have moved into number eight sometime during the early hours in order to spare our blushes.

That was trip seventeen. Oh yeah. The MO was in need of that stress break because Q made him stitch the body of his mid-upper gunner back together again before putting it into the coffin. He went off the station the morning of the boy’s funeral, and we never saw him again. He left a small Austin Seven Chummy, which Piotr bought from him before he left.

The sewn-together pieces of Francis Lambie, Francie, were buried in the small churchyard at Everton about ten miles from Bawne. The Everton church caps a sharp hill, and looks out over Tempsford airfield. Putting him there was a matter of RAF expediency; they were planting the five crew of a Tempsford Halifax, and their three unlucky passengers, on the same day. Some faceless wonder must have figured that it saved official time, expense and effort to tag Francie on to them, rather than give him his own send off. After all, there was a war on. I didn’t mind. Although he was further away from those alive who knew him, he was alongside good company. He’s there still – he wasn’t moved soon after the war the way a lot were: you can see the stone. Visit him sometime, he’d like that. He’d think it funny.

In the graveyard I noticed a marker stone from the 1700s which read something like Joanna Giggle, beloved wife of Jonas, and her dates, and Peace, perfect peace. It had been put there by her husband, and its homily made me smile. It would make Francie smile too. Maybe they could all giggle together in the hereafter. From the squadron there were five from Quelch’s crew, and everyone from Tuesday. Grace came along, but stood away from us close to the church. It was a fine bright day, but the wind had a bone in it which brought tears to the eyes. It got to Grace more than the rest of us: her cheeks gleamed wet in the sharp light. That’s what I chose to think anyway.

Quelch surprised me. His face wore a dangerous look as he stood over Francie’s coffin, defying the whole damned world to say anything ungenerous about his boy. A Home Guard patrol provided the volleys of rifle fire, and a Boy Scout bugler sounded the last notes. I’ve heard that bugle call too many times, and in too many places, to want to hear it again, but it was never better than on that windy Bedfordshire hill top. Bravo, Francie.

When the practised service was complete, Grease and Quelch got us all together in a huddle near the lychgate and told us that we were all up for a week’s leave: Bushes’ orders, apparently.

We’d borrowed the Morris for the funeral so that we could all travel together. We’d even borrowed Fiver to drive it, although she had stayed away from the service and sat in the car. Grace hooked through my arm as we walked back to it, and asked me if I was going back to my folks for leave.

My stomach knotted immediately: I answered her. ‘No.’

‘That’s sad. They’ll want to see you; wherever they are.’

I said, ‘They’ll see me soon enough, if this lot keeps up,’ and gave her the long stare until the penny dropped.

She just said, ‘Oh,’ as if she’d stepped in something a dog had left, dropped her hand from my arm and moved up to walk between Marty and Connors. After a minute she linked her arms through theirs, and I knew exactly what she was asking them. I hadn’t realized that Grease was just behind me, and had caught the exchange. Now he moved up alongside. He didn’t ask me anything, but his silence was saying it all. I told him.

‘My mother, father and kid sister had a house south of London which got on the wrong side of a doodlebug. No one was hurt, but they decided to go up north to my father’s brother in Hamilton in Scotland. They wouldn’t listen to me.’

‘I know where Hamilton is,’ said Grease, ‘we’ve one in Canada, too.’

‘They were lucky. Dad got a job almost immediately, and they got a nice small flat for the duration. It was cheap: probably from someone at the Lodge.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘It was a tidy little tenement flat, with some sort of stove in the kitchen. Mum and my sis used to bank it up when the old man had a night shift, so the place was warm for him to come home to. There was never a problem with fuel: his brother’s down the mines. What they didn’t know was that there was a problem with the flue. Dad came home one morning to find the flat full of fumes, and them long dead. He told me they looked peaceful; like they were asleep, but with rosy red cheeks.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘The funeral was a few days before I joined you. It was such a silly way to go Grease; a bloody waste.’

‘I wish you’d told us. It’s all waste. Even Krauts in night fighters.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘Grace’ll feel bad – putting her foot in it.’

‘She can live with it,’ I told him, but I was thinking of myself.

The passenger seats in the Morris ran across it in benches. I climbed into the rearmost one, sat in the corner and leaned back against the canvas tilt. After some pushing and shoving Grace squeezed in beside me. A few minutes after Fiver lurched it into gear Grace let her head drop on to my shoulder.

‘I guess that we’re even now. I remember being so cross at you when the thing with the Americans came up. I was trying to forget them: to get myself away from them. Everybody has a secret grief these days and I’ve blundered into yours, haven’t I?’

I think that I nodded slowly, taking in what she was trying to say, and said, ‘It’s OK. There are just some things I don’t want to talk about.’

‘My thoughts, precisely. Can we be friends again?’

‘Does that mean I get to have you again?’

‘Until bits start to come off, darling.’ She put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, like someone from one of those Red Army posters you sometimes see. OK, so maybe I loved Grace, but there’s more than one kind of love, isn’t there? Maybe that’s why I asked Pete, who was sitting directly in front of me, to ask Fiver to drop me in the middle of Crifton as we drove through.

‘I’ll see you all later,’ I told them.

The post office was closed. I walked around to the back door and knocked – I could hear dance music coming from the kitchen radio. It was Ambrose and His Orchestra, I think. Susan was wearing the same dress as before. It looked freshly washed and ironed. She smiled, and then stopped smiling, but let me in immediately.

I stepped past her and said, ‘I know you said not too often, but something happened and—’

She surprised me by stopping my mouth with a kiss. Not one of real passion: there was something else in it. Something like I’m angry, but it’s all right this time because I’m also pleased to see you. I lifted her dress, and had her against the wall. She was desperate for me not to come in her, but I was stupid. That must have upset her, but afterwards she stroked my hair, as if I was the one who needed consolation.

This time I stayed for the cup of tea she had originally promised: we sat on hard upright kitchen chairs on either side of the kitchen stove.

‘One of those killed my sister, you know,’ I told her. Then I explained about Black Francie, and how he laughed at the English and everything we did, and was never patronizing. I told her what had happened to him, and about his funeral. I told her about pointless death and my beautiful kid sister. I told Susan that the first time I had seen her I noticed that she had my sister’s beautiful hair; that I knew it would gradually darken and copper over the winter months, and she nodded as if she knew what I was talking about. I told her.

‘Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but when I’m with you it’s like she isn’t quite dead. Not yet. But that’s not why I wanted you.’ I told her that when I had told Grease about my sister, I had thought of her instead. There had been nothing else in my head, and no logic to this, but I said, ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you had said no. You probably knew that.’

She blew on her tea and reached her free hand over to lay it on one of mine.

‘I didn’t. But a bit of notice would help, and . . .’

I knew what she wanted to say. I blocked. ‘Yes. I’m truly sorry about that. It won’t happen again.’

‘No, it won’t; and if there are any consequences this time, remember you’re sharing them. My father’s a solicitor. A vindictive one.’

I laughed.

Then, without warning she made me cry. She made me cry simply by asking my sister’s name. My sister had been named Francesca, for my Italian grandmother. Everyone called her Francie, and her smile lit up the whole world. It suddenly made Black Francie’s equally meaningless death impossible to bear. In front of that terrible shiny enamelled stove, on a hard chair with my head bowed to my knees, I cried myself to pieces in front of a woman I hardly knew.

Afterwards Susan asked me, ‘Could you stay tonight?’

I couldn’t think of a reason not to. I knew the pub the Morris was stopping off at, so I called there. Fiver eventually came to the telephone. She giggled a lot, and made disappointed little mews when I said I’d see them in the morning, as if I had been in with a chance. Who knows; perhaps I had been, I just didn’t know it then. Anyway, birds and bushes sprang to mind, which was a signal my brain had re-engaged; I was straightened up and flying right again, to borrow one of the tunes the Andrews girls were trying out. Least I think it was them.

‘Even if you never ever come back,’ Susan said, ‘let’s have a decent romp tonight: one we won’t forget.’ She must have known something that I didn’t, even then. Sex isn’t always about sex, is it? That night I slept, and I think I began to let both my Francies go.

The next morning I requisitioned a GPO bicycle with Susan’s blessing. She had five posties’ bikes locked in a shed behind the little shop – they were redundant for the duration, but she kept their tyres pumped, and their chains oiled, awaiting the outbreak of peace, and the inevitable triumph of George Rex’s General Post Office. I offered to bring it back later in the day in the back of our car, but she insisted I keep it, and donate it to the war effort. I thought it a useful bit of kit to add to our small land fleet.

Peter the Pole had not hung around. He had started early, and made for town in the Singer with Marty and Fergal, who were both heading for their families. Whenever you started to frame the thought that Pete was an unfeeling bastard who cared for no one except himself, he threw a googly at you. Mine was by way of an open note on the pillow of my bed which had his London telephone number, and a scrawled invitation to feel free to join him if I found myself at a loose end at any time during the week.

Grease was packing: he had a brother in the Wavy Navy who commanded some sort of patrol boat which operated out of Dover. He called it Dover Patrol, but I think that that was the old name for it. He was going to spend a week at the port so that they could see as much of each other as possible.

‘You can come with me. They’d make you welcome – they’re not like the regular Blue Jobs; they have a bit of class,’ he said.

I said, ‘Nah. But thanks. I’ll stick around here, and see if I can get a shag.’

‘Seems to me that you’re not doing too badly on that score at present, young Charles. Is it your youthful good looks I wonder? Maybe you should give the pecker a rest for a week, and let it get its breath back.’

‘Not that you won’t be chasing some fat-bummed Wren around?’

‘Steal the Blue Jobs’ girls? Moi?’

We laughed, and he turned aside to see if he could get another shirt into his leather suitcase. Then he asked, with his back to me, ‘You won’t be going up to see your old man, then?’

‘No. Don’t worry though. I only blamed him for ten minutes: we were OK before I left. The truth is that I don’t want much contact with my former life until we’re through the tour. It’s like the Krauts we’re facing are all Harold Larwood, and I know that if I take my eye off the ball, even for a minute, they’ll have my stumps out of the ground. I can’t afford to do that.’

Grease had his relieved smile on when he faced me. ‘What about the bint you’ve being slipping out to see?’

I explained, ‘Maybe I’ll see her, but maybe not. She’s nice, but only a plate of cakes.’

‘A plate of cakes.’ He said it slowly, as if he was trying to understand a retarded child.

‘Yes, Skip. What do you do if someone puts a plate of cakes in front of you? You grab one – whether or not you’re hungry. Christ; I sound like Pete, don’t I? Don’t worry about me; I’ll make out.’

He grinned. He was halfway to being an officer already, without knowing it. Being asked to make decisions all the time can really shag your head up.

‘I just wanted to know. I didn’t want you sitting here going doolally because you had nowhere to go. If that’s what you want, then it’s all right.’

‘It is what I want . . . and if I get bored I’ll go up to town, and show Pete how to pull a couple of birds.’

‘Pride cometh before a fall, and all that, Charlie.’

I touched his shoulder.

‘Not for us Grease. When we fall it’ll be for three or four miles, and pride won’t come into it, will it?’

I sat on his case so that he could fasten it, and helped him buckle a stout leather strap around it for good measure. I needed two hands to lift it to the floor. To give you a better picture of Grease I’ll tell you that ten minutes later he picked it up with one, and loped to the door of the hut as if he hadn’t a couple of hundredweights hanging off his arm.

‘Where’s Conners and the Toff?’ I asked.

‘They’ve taken the Indian – Toff’s going to drop Conners at the station for the early train: he’s going home.’

‘What’s the Toff doing?’

‘He’s fitting a family visit in somewhere, and then heading to north Wales for a spot of fly fishing. He’s nuts about it; he’s never said a word to us before, but as soon as I said the magic word leave he gobbed on about nothing else. Fiver was practically undressing herself in front of him at Malachie’s last night, and he never bloody noticed; just babbled about Wickham’s Fancies and Soldier Palmers and the like – they’re trout flies, apparently.’

‘How did Fiver take it?’

‘That’s the fucking point. She got so bloody mad that she didn’t take it from anyone. Flounced off with the lorry, and left us to walk back. I reckon that last night that prick she’s married to got lucky for the first time in weeks!’

‘Good for him. I’m all for young wives getting a spot of loving from their hubbies these days,’ I told him.

‘Explain.’

‘Keeps them in practice for bastards like us. Want a beer before you go? There’s a crate under Pete’s bed.’

I showed Grease our new bicycle. He wanted it repainted in Tuesday’s colours, and with her squadron codes on the head tube. While we were discussing that, Chief Ryan drove up in our new Austin Seven Chummy, which he had serviced, and topped up with fuel, for one of Pete’s usual considerations: it was a very smart little car – gleaming black and cherry red coach work with small dark red leather seats. The Chiefy rode off unsteadily on the post bike, saying he’d see what he could do with it before we came back off leave.

Grease asked me, ‘Fancy driving me to the station for the midday train into town? Then the car’s yours for the duration. I won’t need it.’

‘What time’s your connection down to Dover?’

‘1800. Plenty of time to get pissed, or pick up a tart at Lyons.’

Maybe he would. Maybe it would work out for him. I drove him to Cambridge for the noon train, and had a drink afterwards at a small dark bar which had probably seen the Wars of the Roses. I tried to imagine it full of students in peacetime, and couldn’t. The only other customers were two quiet American aircrew in short brown leather jackets, who turned out to be what they called pursuit pilots – what we’d call fighter boys. They weren’t like our fighter boys, who were generally obnoxiously assertive, and loud. These Yanks were quiet and reflective – devout Christian Scientists, they told me – which explained the cloudy lemonade they were drinking. They flew an aircraft they called the P 38: we called it the Lightning. That was its problem, they explained, although its range got it to Berlin and back as a close escort to the daylight bombers, it was just incapable of moving like lightning when the Kraut started shooting at it. Hence their casualty list was high, and morale low. I shook hands solemnly with them, and invited them to join the club. They told me their names, Bales and Winchester, before I left them, and that drinking alcohol would ruin my life. I told them mine, thanked them for their concern, and agreed to visit them in the USA after the war.

What I hadn’t told Grease is that I didn’t think that I’d be seeing Susan again, and the reason was that she wasn’t like Grace. No; it didn’t make much sense to me either. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want him to laugh at me. I told God instead. He did what Grease would have done, and laughed at me. I didn’t know that he had so much to laugh about: I’d seen the cities burning, remember?

It wasn’t my last dance with the Yanks for the day, because Bluto stepped out of the guardhouse as I drove in, and waved me down. He said that an American airman was here to see me, and had been directed to the hut an hour ago. The American was outside the hut sitting on the bonnet of a strange little truck, leaning back against the windscreen, and smoking one of those large cigars they call stogies. The truck was a Dodge; smaller than one of our one-tonners, but with bigger wheels, and four-wheel drive, like a jeep. I had seen one before. This had a canvas tilt over the driver, but hard sides. The body stood high above the ground.

The chevrons on his shoulder told me he was a master sergeant, which meant that technically he outranked me, but he grinned when he saw me, and said in a voice from Gone With the Wind, ‘Hi, Bud. Are you Mr Bassett?’

I walked over, and reached up to shake his proferred hand. ‘Charlie Bassett.’

The American drew in a lungful of smoke. ‘David Thomsett. Tommo. I got a lorry-load of radio spares for you to choose from. Compliments of Major Wynn, United States Army Air Force. He said that you were to take what you needed, and apologizes for not getting back to you about the darts match. Things are difficult for him right now, he says, but he isn’t forgetting that the honour of the USA is at stake.’

Each of his sentences was accompanied by a puffball of tobacco smoke. They looked like small flak bursts.

‘I’m moved, Sergeant.’

‘Well, don’t be, son. Moving is what I had in mind. Jest as soon as you’ve opened up out back, and made your choices.’

He explained that he was a quartermaster sergeant, who could turn his hand to working on an aircraft if he had to – ‘I jest mend the buggers: I don’t fly them’ – and he owed Wynn a favour, and that this was it. He slid down from the truck, and walked me round to open its padlocked back door, revealing a mobile radio workshop with spares and tools in orderly kiosks, on either side of the interior of the rear compartment.

‘Neat, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘We almost never take a radio out of a ship these days. We just drive this little beauty out to them and repair them in situ.’

I took a couple of tuners, spare coils and valves, a box of universal connectors, and an aerial junction to replace the jury rig I had built. I also took US sizes of screwdrivers and spanners. At first Thomsett refused anything for his effort, but then I produced two bottles of Polish vodka, and a bottle of Spanish brandy from one of our lockers. He was delighted by what he said was their rarity value and the gesture, and by the time he was turning his curious little lorry in front of the hut I had bought a friend for life. He’d given me things as well, and said that if I could mend an American radio then it was time to Americanize me anyway. The gifts were a black stogie cigar, a .45 calibre Colt automatic pistol and a box of bullets. Life’s like that; I’d started the day as one of Butch’s bomber boys, and ended it as Wyatt Earp.

It wasn’t until after I had laid out the spares and my new treasures on Conner’s bed that two thoughts occurred in close proximity. The first was to wonder what had happened to Grace – she had been with us as we left the cemetery the day before. The second was the realization that if I did stick around for the week it was odds on that I would be shanghaied into a crew with a sick radio operator, for a trip into the unknown. Then maybe my luck would run out, if I believed in luck. I resolved to telephone the big house that evening, and take off, to wherever, in the morning.

Obviously Fiver wasn’t the only one to hold back on her largesse the evening before because Grace answered the telephone – she had gone directly from Malachie’s, leaving her small kit with us, and asked me to bring it with me when I came. Unless I was any good at washing knickers, she said. I said that I wasn’t, but that was only to satisfy her prejudice; it wasn’t true – I was quite good at it. You wouldn’t want anyone but yourself rinsing out your underwear after a trip, you see.

I went to the mess that evening for a quiet beer, but it didn’t turn out that way. There was a party on for a sergeant pilot who flew a Lancaster with our significant others – the squadron we shared the field with. His name was Peel, and he and his crew had just had the rug pulled out from under them after twenty-nine trips. They’d crash-landed their kite that morning, coming back from Dusseldorf. Peel didn’t describe it as a crash-landing, he just said that his aircraft started to fall to bits as they lugged it over the perimeter fence. That was their T-Tommy, a nice old lady Mk 1 who’d soldiered on since late 1943. She was the oldest aircraft on the airfield by far, with more than a hundred trips chalked up on her nose. She wasn’t going anywhere again, so Paxton, their CO, had decided that neither was her crew; they’d done enough – Peel had the twitch anyway, although not as bad as Bushes.

I was glad for Peel and his boys, even though I’d never got on with them, and sad for Tommy. So we gave them a send-off party together. Fiver danced on a table. They had the knickers off her, black woollen ones like schoolgirls wear for gym. Everyone clapped and cheered, and she did something like a Spanish dance, holding her skirt at her waist snapping her fanny at anyone who hadn’t seen it before. That was when it went quiet for me. I went to one of the small round bar tables at the back of the room, and sipped at my beer, which tasted watery and weak. I was suddenly sober. I thought about Susan’s husband, in some POW compound somewhere, and that led me to think about Fiver’s husband sitting at home alone, listening to the radio. They were probably rebroadcasting Winston, from deep down in his bunker under the war, fat and safe.

Fiver must have seen me sitting alone, because after her dance routine she climbed awkwardly down from the table, and came over to sit by me. She crossed her legs and said, ‘What happened to you last night? I missed you,’ and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke. She used to smoke Piccadilly untipped: you could still get those until a few years ago.

‘I got lost.’

‘I used to get lost like that when I was your age.’ She can’t have had three years on me.

‘When was that?’

One of those silences that friends like. Then a frown; ‘Years ago. Hundreds of years ago.’

My melancholy must have been catching. I told her, ‘Get your knickers back on, and I’ll walk you home.’

She stood up quickly, and gave me an old-fashioned look. She said, ‘I think you got that back to front, Charlie,’ and walked away.

I thought that was that, but I’m wrong most of the time when it comes to women, because she came back a few minutes later, gave me the eye-lock, patted her bum, and said, ‘OK. Ready?’

On the way out we passed Bushes, his wife and several of the more presentable representatives of the officer class. They must have been Peel’s guests. Bushes gave me and Fiver a quick glance, and a smirk. Jennifer’s eyes met mine, and she frowned. It was the way her little mouth dropped into the upside-down smile whenever she didn’t get her own way.

‘Not staying, Sergeant Bassett? I was hoping for a dance tonight.’ Cow. A chinless type on her arm scowled briefly before letting the grin back on to his face.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘Not in the mood for it. I think there’s a war on,’ and then Fiver tugged me past.

The quickest route was around the peri-track, out through our hole in the wire, and along the Bawne road. It was a fine crisp night with plenty of light. Fiver started to drag her heels as we approached the shed I lived in, but I didn’t slacken our pace, and took her out on to the road. There was an early ground frost, and our shoes clacked on the metalled surface. Fiver hung on to my arm as if I was the last boat on the Lusitania, and eventually told me, ‘This is nice.’

‘Yes. I suppose it’s good to be good now and again.’

‘You are a good man, Charlie.’

‘No. You mustn’t say that. I’m not.’

‘Charlie Bassett you’re a good, kind man. Why do you think you’re not?’

I tried to put into words something that had been welling up in me for days. I could tell Fiver because I thought she wasn’t that clever. How wrong can you be?

‘I don’t think I know the difference between right and wrong any more . . . or good or bad,’ I said.

She gave a little laugh. She had a fine, girl’s laugh; one that would remind you of a brook gurgling. ‘You’re such a fool, Charlie. Nobody knows that these days.’

She kissed me at the gate of the cottage she shared with her husband; her mouth was big and open and wet and moved with a wonderful sensuous sloth. Once kissed never forgotten. It had nothing to do with passion, and everything to do with companionship and greed.

‘Come in for a cup of tea. Dougie won’t mind – we don’t get too much company.’ she said.

I was introduced to the contractor in a small, warm sitting room. He no longer had the Hitler moustache I remembered. Vera Lynn – and whatever you may have heard, we never called her the ‘Forces Sweetheart’: we called her something else altogether – was jumping off ‘The White Cliffs Of Dover’, from a smart new Bakelite radio.

‘Is that live from the Troc?’ I asked him.

‘Aye. Have you ever been there?’

‘Yes. Several times. You can always tell – it has an echo all of its own.’

‘I’ve never been up to London myself. Maybe after the war.’

Close to he was maybe twenty years older than his wife, and wearing badly with it. There was a pipe on a smoker’s friend beside one of the chairs, and a heavy scent of Navy Cut in the air. Fiver had greeted him with a hug and a kiss, and I had been unprepared for the obvious affection she had for him. She left us, and I heard water, kettle and crockery noises from another room. As soon as she left the room he offered me an expression which asked a question without words. I shook my head briefly and firmly, and said, ‘No.’

I felt bad about the relief on his face. For him, I think, her going with those dead young men at the airfield was just about bearable . . . but if she had started to bring them home?

Fiver’s tea was strong, and without sugar – they’d blown their ration the week before, she said. She warmed her toes in front of the fire, I talked about cricket before the war, and Doug talked of the first job he’d laboured on – repairing the Byfleet banking at Brooklands. He’d even raced there himself, in club events. Even although there were only the two of them, by the time I slipped away before midnight I felt as if I had had a glimpse of something I hadn’t seen for months: something like a family.

I will admit to a slightly elevated pulse – as one of the RAF docs would say – when I saw Bushes’ car outside the hut on my return. But it wasn’t her. The Boss was sitting on the end of number eight in the dark. His head was resting on his chest, and he had taken his trousers off. You could have smelt the beer from him upwind forty yards away. I think that he was sweating it. He had an unhealthy pallor, but then, most drunks have, and I wasn’t then the expert I have since become. The building was chill. He ignored my arrival, or didn’t sense it, so the first thing I did was bank up the stove. When I walked back to him he stirred and muttered, ‘Where d’ye get all the coal?’

‘The same place you get the tyres for your banger, Boss. Them that asks no questions . . .’

‘Poetry. You must have gone to a good school.’ Then he coughed a deep and liquid cough: I wondered if the MO knew about that. Then I remembered that we’d just lost our doc.

‘I did.’ I told him, ‘Grammar grub. But it was wasted on me, wasn’t it – that’s what you think, anyway. Bloody hated it.’

I moved behind him, and turned the sheet and blankets back. For a moment I smelled Grace – expensive perfume, and sex.

The squadron leader asked, ‘What ye doing now?’

‘Putting you to bed, Boss; you’re as pissed as a fart.’

It was easy to topple him back, push him into the bed, and remove his tie: I didn’t want him to strangle himself in his sleep.

As I pulled the blankets over him he said, ‘Odd expression that. How does a fart get pissed? It just gets farted. Don’ go away: sit there for a moment.’ He gestured vaguely towards the next bed; Fergal’s, as it happens.

‘I’m fagged out, Boss, I want to get my head down.’

‘I wanna tell you something.’

‘OK. What is it, sir?’

‘It’s about the wonderful taste of fish. It’s something I found out.’ He had reached the running-one-word-into-the-other stage, and his eyes were already closed. I wondered how many pints of the watery ruin they were serving in the bar a man needed to drink to get as drunk as he was.

‘I went to a public school, you know: a cheap one, but a good one. All the juniors talked about sex all the time, an’ never got any of course. You listening to me?’

I nodded, but he would have gone on anyway.

‘. . . unless one of the seniors buggered you. There was this fat one called Carrington – got the MC last year; a sapper major would you believe? – I remember him telling me that if you licked fanny it tasted of fish. He was the first one to tell me that.’

‘I was told that when I was a kid, too.’

I lit a Players, and remembered the sweet tobacco smell in Fiver’s front room. Maybe it was time to take up a pipe. Some of the fathers of the squadron smoked them.

‘You don’t follow me, Bassett. The point is, that in my sort of school an awful lot of jacking off went on . . . and if it really made you blind, half the fucking men in the world would be blind by now, wouldn’t they? Well, I soon learned that if you didn’t wash yourself clean afterwards you began to smell. And what is more is that smell was distinctly fishy. You foller? I remembered that again today.’

‘That’s very profound, sir, but I really don’t need this.’

‘You still don’t understand, do you, ape? What that means is the next time you go down on a woman and she tastes of fish, all you’ll be doing is licking out what the man who was there just before you left behind him. See? This “girls taste like fish” crap is just something the women made up in order to get away with murder.’

‘Thank you for that, sir: but I told you; that’s something I didn’t need to know.’

‘You’re a cocky little snot, Bassett, but a handy sparks.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Then I stood up, and said, ‘Goodnight.’

‘G’night Sparks.’

I walked away from him to my own bed. I turned off the light, and undressed unsteadily in the glow of the stove. I’ve told you before that I didn’t like banking the stove: it reminded me each day of my mother and sister. I couldn’t help wondering what they were doing, even though I knew that they were dead. I’d never see them again. Or maybe I would.

Just before I closed my eyes Bushes said quite distinctly, ‘My wife, you know – her name’s Jennifer; sweet Jenny. She is sweet, but she tastes of fish lately.’

I said, ‘You don’t mean that, sir. It’s just the beer doing your thinking for you.’ It was ridiculous, but at that moment I felt older and wiser than him, and added, ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

But we didn’t, because when I awoke he was gone, and the bed so neatly made that I wondered if I’d dreamed it.

Driving the little saloon was almost a restful experience, because driving it anything other than sedately would have been really stupid: with its high centre of gravity it would have overturned if cornered at more than about fifteen miles per hour. That’s why the battered jeep with two Americans in it caught me up so quickly on the run through the trees to Crifton. One of them fired a pistol in the air to attract my attention – at first I thought that they had had a blowout. I stopped, and they pulled in behind. Maybe it was a stick-up.

When the passenger walked forward to me I said, ‘I suppose you’re going to ask me to throw down the money box, and stick up my hands. Sorry to disappoint.’

‘What?’ Then he grinned. ‘Oh. I get that. Stagecoach. Sorry. We couldn’t get past because the road is so narrow, and couldn’t think of another way to signal you – there’s no horn on that thing.’

I held my hand out to him. ‘Charlie Bassett: I’m on Lancs at Bawne. This is my week for meeting Yanks.’

‘I’m Harold Manley, and the stiff driving me is July Johnson. We’re from Thurleigh.’

‘I know a couple of guys from Thurleigh. Dave Thomsett, and a pilot called Peter Wynn. Do you know them?’

Manley groaned, and rubbed his hand over his face. Sackcloth and ashes.

‘Shit. You know Bandit and the Major. You won’t tell them about the shot, will you?

‘Not if you ever get round to telling me why you wanted me to stop in the first place.’

‘OK,’ he said. Then he called back over his shoulder to the jeep. ‘Come ’ere July, an’ hide your fucking piece: this Limey knows the Major.’

They were both navigators from the 306th, and one of their good pals, another nav, had flown into the Long Ride at Crifton in the B-17 which had never come out again. They wanted to know if they’d get permission to see the spot their friend had fried in. The thought of them putting the same question to a frosty Grace stopped me. I got them to park up alongside the cavernous coach house, and agree not to leave their jeep unless I called them forward. I did something right for a change. Grace had come out to greet me, but stopped as soon as she saw the Americans. She was wearing riding pants, a crisp white blouse and an expression which would have dropped an elephant at a hundred paces.

‘They knew the navigator on your B-17,’ I told her, ‘and they just want to see where their pal died. They were driving down to ask permission.’

‘Just tell them yes, and get rid of them.’

‘Do you want to meet them?’

As I turned away she touched my arm and added, ‘Tell them to come back when they’ve finished. For a glass of lemonade, or something.’

I nodded. ‘OK . . . and Grace?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ve never looked lovelier.’ I blurted out exactly what I meant. Grace blushed. Bullseye.

She looked up at the crisp blue sky momentarily, then back at me. ‘It’s really autumn,’ she said.

‘“No spring, no summer beauty hath such Grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face.” It is Donne this time.’

‘You will have to stop doing that, Charlie.’

‘Can I stay? If I don’t, they may make me fly.’

‘Stupid. Your bed’s been made up since yesterday.’

They had put a hefty table, with a two-inch marble slab on top, and four heavy old chairs in the stone basement room where I had challenged Grease with his mountains of murdered birds. The room was clean and cool. Mrs Barnes had taken to her bed (‘with an indisposition’ Mr Barnes told us). Consequently one Mrs Coates would serve tea.

‘I take it that Mrs Coates is of the same vintage as he is?’ I asked.

‘No, she’s about twenty years younger than the Barneses . . . say, about fifty. And frisky. Tim came across her with someone in the woods off the Long Ride once.’

‘Who’s Tim?’

She walked away and looked upwards through the long narrow window above our heads. From that angle there was nothing to be seen except sky. Grace gave me the significant pause before she replied, ‘He was co-piloting the B-17 which made the hole those two boys have gone out to see.’

When we heard the high-revving jeep engine Grace asked me to pull hard on an iron hand grip attached to a wire which hung down alongside the door.

‘I take it that I’ve just rung for tea?’ I said to her.

‘Yes, you have. Don’t blush, and don’t think of it as an imperative. You’ve just tipped off Coates when to serve. You’ve saved her a trip: if you hadn’t done that, she would have had to come all the way down here to ask us, return to the kitchens, and then come down here again with the tea. You don’t understand because you weren’t born to service.’

‘You’re definitely not a socialist then?’

‘Nor a prig like you, Charlie Bassett, if that’s what you mean. The only difference between socialists, Liberals and Tories, is that Tories are more likely to stick it up the wrong hole when they’re pissed.’

‘I wish I had your experience of life, Grace.’

Her face fell. ‘No you don’t. Really you don’t.’

She put the bounce back as the two Americans walked in, followed by Barnes, who was serving our tea himself. Perhaps Mrs Coates was having a little lie down. The man named July Johnson looked less at ease than the other, Manley. He didn’t meet Grace’s eye as he spoke to her. ‘Hi, Miss Grace. You won’t remember me.’

‘Yes I will. You’re July Johnson’ – she put the stress on the first syllable of July. ‘You flew with Tim a few times when Roger Graham was sick.’

The boy looked sick with embarrassment. He ducked his head.

‘Do you still carry that damned pistol everywhere with you?’ Grace asked him.

He grinned back. Looking at her this time. Then a shadow passed, and he said, ‘I’m sorry . . . we’re all sorry about what happened to Good Golly . . .’

‘That was Tim’s plane,’ Grace explained for my benefit.

Johnson ploughed on as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘but I’m not going to stand here in front of you and pretend that it wasn’t anything other than plain stupid. Stupid flying.’

I gave Manley a brief warning glance and waited for Grace to explode. The thing about Grace is that she has this infinite capacity to surprise: she moved quickly to Johnson’s side, laid a hand on his arm, and spoke very gently to him. ‘It’s all right, July. I know. It was stupid flying, but they’re all gone now, and now we have got to get on with it. Tim would be pleased to think of you and Harold here; making sure I’m OK.’

‘Yeah; he’d say that was nice.’

Grace said, ‘Are you two ready for tea and a sandwich now? Charlie and I are starving.’

Johnson said, ‘Am I just! Sitting down to tea with the daughter of a Sir, in an ancient English country pile: who’s gonna believe this back home?’

Later that evening Grace and I ate our supper in the kitchen. This made Barnes uncomfortable, but Mrs Barnes bustled around us like a mother hen with her two favourite chicks. She was a heavily built lady who chuckled a lot. I smelled 8711, and the stale wine on her breath, as she bent over me to serve a thick brown spicy soup, which was followed by a cold cut of lamb, heavy with fat, and small, sweet golden potatoes and a steep hill of cabbage. The cabbage tasted so good that it must have still been in the ground that morning. Barnes unbent enough to agree to himself and Mrs Barnes joining us at the table for a mug of tea, and a glass of whisky: Mrs Barnes would have killed him if he had refused. Barnes had laid a fire in the grate in the library, which is where we finished the evening.

At some point I confessed. I told Grace, ‘I fall in and out of love with you every few days. I’m just like a yo-yo.’

‘I know. The trouble is that we aren’t synchronized. You’re on the way down, as I’m moving up. When you’re in love with me I can hardly stand the sight of you: I can’t bear being fussed over. Then as soon as you’ve gone I’m so desperately unhappy. I simply can’t wait until I see you again.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Sometimes I love them too. Do you mind?’

‘Not awfully. It’s a bloody strange war, if it does this sort of thing to you, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘What about tonight?’

‘Would you mind terribly if we didn’t, Charlie? It’s not terribly convenient.’

‘I can always ask Mrs Coates.’

Next day Barnes woke me with tea and a wad.

‘Excuse me, sir. There’s a gentleman to see you. Miss Grace asked me to call you, but she said you weren’t to hurry,’ he said.

‘I heard a woman singing: before I went to sleep.’

‘I don’t doubt it, sir. But there’s no one living in this wing now – apart from yourself. Might you have been dreaming?’

‘I might,’ I told him, but I didn’t believe it.

Grace and Bushes were sitting opposite each other in leather chairs in what Barnes had called the smoking room. It was probably because the fireplace smoked. Bushes was wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket over service trousers, shirt and tie: he looked too tired to get up, and didn’t. I had automatically stiffened to attention in spite of my natural inclination, and my civvy clothes. Grace was wearing a silk, pink, slinky thing, with a sash tie, which slid over her figure like liquid. She was giving him oodles of leg.

Bushes said, ‘Morning, Bassett. Sorry to break into your leave, but two types in long coats have been stooging around asking for your bloody tail gunner. That Polish pig. Our honourable receiver of stolen property.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Won’t say, but they have ID cards which claim Ministry of Works, and have large open numbers stamped on the face of them, like bus tickets. One of them’s one of us, and the other’s another bloody Pole I think. Don’t believe a bloody word of it, because they’re bloody policemen of some sort, of course.’

‘What do they want?’

‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell the wingco either, so he had them booted off the patch. That is quite literally; but I’m sure that they’ll be back with all the right papers.’

‘Did they search the hut?’

‘Funny thing that. Nobody seemed to remember where Paluchowski was billeted.’ That made me smile. ‘I thought that if you had a telephone number for the Pole you could give him a bell, find out what it’s all about – that sort of thing.’

‘I’m sorry: Pete never leaves me a contact number when he’s away.’

‘Course not. Just a passing thought.’

‘Thank you, sir. Tuesday will appreciate it. What did you have for Miss Baker, or is that private?’

Cab Calloway was belting out ‘The Mermaid Song’ on the radio. Grace stretched out a hand at waist level, and studied her fingernails. She said, ‘Conny’s told me that I won’t be flying any Lancasters for a while. They’re going to deliver the last five in a oner; this week, while I’m away. And he’s apologized for having me grounded.’

‘Grounded, sir?’

‘Yes although it was a bit of a mistake actually. She was flying that ruddy Spit which almost wiped my nose last week. I complained to the War House – they found out that it was an ATA delivery flight: my bad luck was that it was Grace who was flying it. Back to some OTU.’

‘Bravo, Grace. Bravo, sir.’

Bushes squirmed in his chair: he had never looked comfortable in it anyway. ‘Don’t worry: I’ll fix it,’ he said.

Grace said, with a captivating little smile which put the world right, ‘Don’t you worry, too. I already knew, and it’s already fixed; the grounding’s only for eight weeks. I’ve been ATA flying without a proper gap since 1941, so they’ve sent me off on eight weeks compulsory leave. I’m sure that I’ll be back in the sky after that.’ Then Grace told him, ‘Now you’re here, you’ll stay for breakfast, even if you’ve already eaten. Charlie and I are starving.’ That was the second time she had told someone how well she was feeding me.

Afterwards we walked the Boss to the front door, and saw him into his grotesque little tin box. Grace was being a good hostess, whilst I just wanted to see him off the premises. I followed her up the wide dark wood staircase to her room, feeling that I was climbing through history. Her bed was an enormous four poster with black wood posts polished by a thousand hands. It had rich, green brocade drapes.

‘I wish I could have seen his face!’ she said.

‘When?’

‘When I flew the Spit underneath him, and popped up in front. I bet he had to stand on his pedals. Hasn’t much of a sense of humour, has he?’

‘He’s got the twitch. He probably filled his trousers.’

‘I’ll forgive him.’

‘You were flying dangerously. Grease would have reported you as well.’

‘Grease can be very po-faced about flying: you all can. I was flying it like a Goddess, and probably for the last time. There aren’t that many Mk 1s left. Imagine how you’ll make love to me when we know it’s our last time, Charlie: it was like that.’

‘You think too much.’

Grace lay back on her bed and flashed herself at me; nipples like ridged brown bullseyes.

‘Wanna bet?’ she asked.

I recognized the voice of the girl who answered the phone, but couldn’t place her. She sounded sleepy. I tried again, because I was sure I knew the voice, but the picture of a face wouldn’t come. Pete sounded wide awake. He moved effortlessly between sleep and complete alertness.

‘Did I wake you, Pete?’

‘No. She did.’

‘There’s been a couple of coppers, policemen, up at the station asking for you. One of them might be a Pole; are you in some sort of trouble?’

‘Me? No. What did they want?’

‘It didn’t get as far as that. The wingco and the Boss gave them the bum-rush, but the Boss thinks they’ll come back.’

‘Must be some political thing: some mistake – I told you we had Nazis on both sides of the Channel these days.’ He sounded breezy and unconcerned. ‘I make some calls, Charlie.’

‘That’s probably a good idea, Pete,’ and I gave him the telephone number of the Hall if he wanted me to do anything. If he recognized it he didn’t say.

‘Hey, Charlie; you think we’ll go back to Krefeld next week?’

If I had been as po-faced as Grace thought we were, I should have said something about careless talk costing lives. Instead, I said, ‘Probably. We’ve made a fucking mess of the job every time we’ve been so far. Sooner or later Butch is going to want it done over severely.’

‘I thought that too,’ said the Pole. ‘Thanks for calling me. Don’t worry. This is nothing I can’t fix.’ Then he put the receiver down. You got no hallos or goodbyes with Pete. And I agreed with him: there was nothing that a Pink Pole couldn’t fix – that’s what I believed when I was twenty, anyway.

I worked on the radio all day, and by the time I had finished I could have talked to the moon, if the Yanks could have flown a B-17 that far. In the late afternoon I tuned into the traffic coming from a daylight raid the Yanks were mounting over the Kiel canal. It was a terrific signal. Chiefy Bryan would have liked this radio – it was better than Tuesday’s.

That night Grace wanted to go to the pub in Crifton. She was well known there. We drank too much Tolly Cobbold beer, which was dark and sweet, and drove the Austin slowly back to Park House for that, and another reason – the air was thickening. That night there was a dense fog.

Grace wanted me again, but her mind wasn’t engaged by what we did, and part of me was secretly glad when she suggested that we sleep apart, and get some small benefit from the night.

I was awoken about 0300, but not by the woman who wasn’t singing in the corridor outside. It was a rude awakening, with a torchlight shone in my face. For a moment I was back on the squadron, but then Barnes dragged me back into the real world.

‘Mr Charles. Please wake up. There’s something bad happening outside,’ he said.

I sat up in bed, and pulled on a sweater I had thrown down over the end of it. Barnes went over to the window, turned off his light, drew back the blackout and opened the small frame. Tendrils of khaki-grey fog licked in at him immediately. I had seen this stuff before: it hung in the air like a living wet moss. You could be fooled into thinking that it had a sentient malevolence. Then I heard them: Merlins, their sweet music ebbing and flowing. Some nearer, some further away, then some nearer again. They were in the circuit.

I joined the old man at the window, asking him, ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘More than an hour.’

‘Shit. They’ll be dying out there soon.’

‘I think that they already are, sir, which is why I came for you. After the first one went down. Is there anything we can do?’

‘Not a damned thing, Mr Barnes.’

I switched on the big green radio in its battered case, and searched for the radio profile they were using. It was my trade: too easy really, and the one occasion I wished otherwise. It wasn’t the squadron, but our stablemates on the other side of the station, and they must have had a lucky raid, or an easy one, rather; there’s no such thing as a lucky raid. It seemed too cruel that they’d dragged their bombers back from Germany, only to have to fly in circles over their home station – until their engines stopped, and they began to die in their own back yard.

Barnes had a cat’s whisker radio of his own, and listened in to the radio operators each night as our fleets set out for Krautland, and then limped back. In his head, and through his cheap earphones, he came to Germany with us. After he’d heard the first one go in he’d seen a distant glow in the fog. Then he’d come to me, because he understood the tragedy around him, and thought that I would know what to do about it: all I could do was share the nightmare.

We drank his employer’s whisky, and listened to the voices of the WOPs reporting dwindling fuel reserves, until each of their aeroplanes became their coffins. They took more than an hour to go. Most of the skippers ordered their crews to abandon, but it was evident that most of the crews had refused: no one wants to jump blind if they can help it. So we heard them go off the air, one by one. Barnes knew them by their voices better than I ever could – he’d been listening to them for weeks. He’d say, ‘That’s L-London,’ or ‘That’s Andrew Thomson’s crew.’ Then he’d take another sip of the whisky and stare out of the window.

We thought we heard two distant crumps as thirty tons of steel and aluminium buried itself nearby, and on one occasion we definitely saw a brief orange-yellow glow, a flare in the fog a few miles away. The last one took ten minutes to go on its own, after the rest had ploughed in. I had met the sparks a few times, although I couldn’t remember his name. His last words were, ‘One engine gone,’ followed by, ‘both port engines out,’ and finally, after a pause of about a minute or so, he shouted, ‘tim-ber!’

Then all we had left was static. My speciality. I switched off the beast which had brought the war into our room. What was left of the whisky was in our glasses. Barnes swallowed his in an impressive oner, and asked me, ‘Exactly what happened there, sir?’

‘They lost the lot, Barnsey. They lost the whole fucking squadron.’

‘I see.’ He moved unsteadily to the window, closed it and drew the blackout curtain. His torch beam seemed blindingly bright after the gloom. Then he said it again. ‘I see, Mr Charles.’ Then, ‘I think that I’ll be getting along now. Thank you for keeping me company.’

‘Thank you too, Barnsey.’

I stood in the doorway and watched his torch beam waver along the long narrow corridor, bouncing off the dark panelled walls. Somewhere far away a girl began to sing. But she wasn’t real, so I went back to my bed, and lay on my back staring at the ceiling until the whisky overcame me.

In the morning everyone in the great house found an excuse to be in the kitchen. Six of us: we were like rabbits huddling together after the Death Fox had completed his night’s work. Grace even cleared some of the dishes. No one said much. I dropped one of the windows to catch the last heat of the year: then I slammed it up again, because there was smoke on the wind.

When Grace sat down alongside me I asked her, ‘Did you sleep through the racket last night?’

‘Yes, ’fraid so. Mrs Coates told me this morning.’

‘Glad it’s not me.’

‘I wonder if you are?’

Sometimes Grace punched straight for the balls. ‘How many?’ she asked.

‘I’d guess at about sixty-five. There are always some miracles, statistically. I suppose that’s why you always get back in the plane. You’re always going to be one of the miracles.’

‘I think that you will be, Charlie.’

‘I know. So do I. I’m just not sure that I want to be any more, but don’t tell any of the others.’

‘What will the RAF do – now they’ve lost a whole squadron?’

‘Talk lots of guff about national pride, the honour of the squadron, bravery and endurance – you know the form. Then ship in twelve new kites and about ninety bods, and start all over again.’ Grace gave a bitter little laugh, and I asked her, ‘What’s that for?’

‘I was just thinking. They might need you and me back sooner than they thought.’

‘You fancy driving over to Bedford tonight? We could see what’s being served at the Lamb, and maybe see a flick – as long as it isn’t The Wizard of bloody Oz again!’

‘OK – but you’re on your own for the next few hours. I’m going to ride the whole of the estate boundary.’

‘Don’t damage any serfs.’

‘Piss off, Charlie.’

Mrs Bassett’s son doesn’t need more than one time of telling. I sat in the library and read in the end-of-year sunlight, which streamed through the deep windows, consuming cups of tea, coffee and sandwiches brought to me at regular intervals by Mrs Coates. There was a radio in the corner, the bloody place seemed full of them. I found an Anne Shelton programme, and then Big Hearted Arthur took over for half an hour of silliness. He sang ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ and I wondered again why the Germans had ever thought they could conquer a nation which could see the funny side of the war.

Barnes came to find me at about 1600. ‘Miss Grace is back, sir. She’s still down in the stable block.’ There was no mistaking the tone of his voice. Orders are orders: befehl ist befehl.

I noticed that she had a black smudge on her forehead. When she lifted her right hand to wipe it away I saw a red weal, like a burn, on the back of it.

‘What do you do in 1944,’ she speared me with, ‘if you want a couple of your very own Lancaster bombers?’

‘I don’t know. What do you do?’

‘You buy a small estate in Bedfordshire . . . and you just bloody wait.’ When I didn’t bite she added, ‘We have two new ones out there since last night, although they’re not much bloody good any more.’

‘Anybody get out?’

‘Don’t know.’ She sniffed, and I realized that she had been crying. ‘Shouldn’t think so. They just look like the remains of rather enormous bonfires.’ Then she started to cry again. I felt awkward doing it, but I hugged her.

When she could speak again she said, ‘There’s a field they call Alan’s Field, for some old reason. It’s just a thirty-acre hump in the land. When you stand in the middle of it the ground drops away from you on all sides, and you can see three counties – it’s my favourite place. We deep-ploughed it last week.’

I wasn’t going to like whatever came next, but I asked her anyway. ‘Is that where the wrecks are?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘They’re a couple of fields to the south. No: there is a man standing in Alan’s Field.’ She suddenly buried her face in my shoulder, and muffled her words, ‘They told me he was a radio operator, just like you. He’s upright, half buried in the top of the hill, just like a scarecrow or a statue standing there. His parachute had opened but it was all tangled up. His eyes were open, and he was smiling. Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ . . .’ She punched weakly at my chest as if it had been my fault. I thought of what his body must have been like below the waist if he’d plunged feet first into the field. Then I pushed the picture away. I held her as tightly as I could, as if I could squeeze the horror out of us.

Eventually I asked her, ‘What’s being done?’

She stayed in my arms, but leaned backwards away from me, tapped my chest twice with her burned hand, sniffed, and told me, ‘I’ve sent Anna Etta up there, with two of the older men. They’ll dig him out, and bring him down on the handcart. Bawne says that they’re rather busy, and if we can keep him overnight they’ll collect him in the morning. Ghoulish.’

‘Ghoulish,’ I agreed, and turned her so that she was beside me but with my arm still draped around her shoulders. That’s how I walked her back into the house; Grace needed a bath, and we both needed to get inside a bottle of her old man’s whisky.

The film was a Will Hay film: I can’t remember much about it, or its title. It had rained again just before we sat down, so the auditorium was hazy with smoke and steam. A few weeks ago I had looked on the flicks as my best shot at getting my hand inside a girl’s blouse – now it was different: there was no desperation. Is that what happens to married couples, I wondered? Anyway, I could relax, hold hands, and enjoy the Fat Boy on the screen; he always made me laugh.

We had a couple of pricey drinks in the old pub on the High Street, and then Grace led me across the road to the American Red Cross Officers’ Club. Strictly speaking the club was off-limits for me – I hadn’t been touched by the magic dust which made me an officer or American – but Grace seemed to know the guys on the door, and they guested me for the night. The air inside was pungent with the smell of American toasted tobacco, and maybe something else that I wasn’t as familiar with, but had been shown RAF educational films about. A quick look round indicated no one going mad in my near vicinity, so maybe the films had got it wrong. It was mainly a place to sit and drink in, although a lot of the guys seemed to be stuck on coffee. There was a small dance floor served by a small combo of four musicians, probably moonlighting from one of the big USAAF bands. They did ‘Begin the Beguine’, and ‘Moonlight Serenade’ and things like that.

Peter Wynn drifted past on tiptoes, dancing a girl two sizes too big for him, but his eyes unglazed momentarily when he noticed me.

‘Hi, Charlie. You still around?’

‘Hi yourself, Major. Guess I am.’

‘You got Grace with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great. Tell her I’ll get that dance from her later.’

Grace was a great dancer, fast, flowing and exquisitely balanced – and consequently in constant demand. I only had one dance from her. I moved over to part of the club where three huge leather Chesterfield settees were arranged D-fashion to a fireplace, like the chairs in the smoking room at Crifton. A smaller group of mainly older officers were bunched there, standing around a woman in the dark uniform jacket and skirt of the American Red Cross, with its bright round shoulder patch. I noticed her noticing me, and she waved me over, patting the seat alongside her. She was somewhere in her early thirties, and had thick dark short hair. Her speaking voice was both feminine and mannish at the same time, and midAmerican; like Lauren Bacall after she was famous, and halfway through the day’s first pack of cigarettes.

‘We don’t see many RAF boys here: you must be honoured. Like a coffee?’

‘Yes please.’ She waved over a coloured waiter. ‘I’m with Grace.’

‘Ah, Grace. She’s a great dancer isn’t she? Hang on to her, and you’ve got a ticket into anywhere you please.’

‘I’m Charlie Bassett.’

‘Pleased to meet you Charlie Bassett. I’m Emily.’

‘Are you a nurse?’

‘Hell no. I just run this joint. Leastways, the entertainment side of it.’

‘Just checking me out?’ I asked her.

She laughed this absolutely great laugh. ‘Just checking you out,’ she agreed. ‘Do you know any of the guys here?’

‘I know Major Wynn, and most of his crew if they’re around.’

She said, ‘You know Peter?’ Then she gave me a shrewd eyeball-to-eyeball look. It was like she was seeing clear through to the back of my head. ‘When d’you last see him?’

‘A week ago . . . maybe a bit longer.’

‘He’s lost a couple since then. I wouldn’t ask about them if I was you.’

‘Thanks.’ I gulped my coffee. It was still scalding hot, but I took it like a man, feeling my palate crisp. Across the smoke I saw the waiter suddenly grin. I grinned back.

‘Where did you meet him?’ Emily asked.

‘My crew ended up in a drinking competition with his in a London club, a few weeks back. Then I met him again at the Wellington in Bawne village. That’s about twenty miles away from here.’

‘Yes. I know it. There’s a maze in the church there, isn’t there? That drinking competition in London? The winners didn’t get to end up across a bunch of American nurses by any chance?’

I don’t think that she could see my blush in the poor light.

Grace danced in and out of view from time to time, always with a different partner; once with Peter Wynn. She was more his size than the Amazon I had originally seen him with; they looked good together. After an hour or so I caught a glimpse of her leaving the room through another door, with a different airman. They were holding hands. I watched for her coming back between the gaps in conversation with Emily and a serious USAAF aviation doctor, who had wire-frame spectacles. It took about fifteen minutes, then Grace danced with someone else. She blew me a kiss as she moved past.

We left half an hour later. Emily entered my details in a ‘permanent guest register’, and asked me to drop by any time. There was something about the way she and Grace exchanged greetings, right there at the end. Grace kept her chin up, but whatever it was, she got the worst of it.

In the car she told me, ‘That place is not so much fun any more,’ then chewed her lip.

I drove the little car very slowly, on account of the drink and the blackout, and we smoked cigarettes from the deck of Luckies someone had slipped her. We had the car windows wound down just a crack, so that the smoke was sucked out into the night.

Some time after we passed St Neots I asked her, ‘Why did you do that? Go out with that Yank? If you’re feeling that randy all you have to do is ask.’

‘And you’ll come panting? Really, Charlie?’

‘No. Be serious, Grace: why?’

‘Because he asked me, if you must know. He told me that he was going to die tomorrow and that he wanted me. Why not?’

‘And if he doesn’t die tomorrow? How many times has he used that line?’

‘Who cares? He’s going to go soon, that’s all that matters. He’s a dead man; it’s all over his face. He is going to die. Believe me.’

‘What about me?’

She sighed as if in exasperation. ‘I’ve told you, Charlie; you’re going to make it. You and the Tuesdays. That fact alone makes you quite an attractive proposition in some light.’

‘Thanks Grace.’

‘Grow up, Charlie. You make me feel old.’

Snap, I thought, but didn’t speak aloud.

After a mile’s silence she asked, ‘Anyway. What were you doing?’

‘I was talking to that woman Emily. I liked her.’

Grace’s riposte was quick and bitter. A rapier thrust. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘everyone loves Emily.’

After that she turned in her seat away from me, and showed me her back for the rest of the journey.

Breakfast the following morning was a small mountain of nature’s bounties. Where did civilians get that decadent heap of food from? It was a year’s bacon and egg ration for a small family. I told Grace that I would leave later that morning.

‘Do you remember Conners asking me how I navigated as accurately as I do?’ she said.

‘Yes; you told him you followed the railway lines, and showed him a railway map of England. We do that sometimes now if we’re low level over France or Holland: Pete got us a pre-war railway map of north-western Europe from somewhere. It’s a bit tatty, but Conners loves it more than his charts.’

‘Well, I lied. Or didn’t tell the whole story, rather.’

‘What’s the rest of it?’

‘There was a book I read before the war, while I was learning to fly. It was called The Old Straight Track, by a travelling salesman named somebody Watkins. He had travelled all over England, by horse and trap, and early car: he said that if you look along alignments of significant features in a landscape – hills, church steeples, very old trees, gaps in hedges and old lanes – you could see the remains of ancient straight trackways that date from before the Romans: from even before the folk who laid down the Drift. He believed that these invisible tracks linked some sort of prehistoric religious centres: he called them ley lines or something. I think that the religious centres bit is a load of old tosh, but the lines are there; you can see them clearly from the air. I use them as well as my railway atlas to navigate with. All you have to do is look at the landscape with a big eye for the patterns on it, instead of a small eye for detail. From above 700 feet you can see for about three miles.’

‘What’s this to do with me leaving?’

She sighed and gave me the look. I felt like an idiot again.

‘Absolutely nothing, Charlie. Do drop in again the next time you’re passing.’

She stood up and left the kitchen immediately. I realized that for the first time I had experienced a flounce, in all its flaming glory.

Barnes gave me a wink which was so slow that I almost mistook it for a full side facial tic: he said, ‘Ye are fallen from Grace: Galatians 5.4.’

I suppose he was used to it.

As soon as I stepped into the Nissen hut and dropped my bag on the floor I was aware that something was wrong: it wasn’t as cold as it should have been. Someone had been at the nutty slack, and the stove was still warm to the touch. Either one of the boyos was back from leave early, or we’d been occupied. Maybe the Nazis had landed, and Mr Churchill had forgotten to tell us.

The Boss bustled in shortly after my arrival: I knew it was him by the hideous squealing of his car’s brakes outside – only his Hillman made that noise, and only he drove it badly enough to produce it. He was embarrassed, as well he might be: either he had been slumming it, up to no good with a floozy, or had been subject to a spectacular demotion – it was his spare clobber spread on and about old number eight. He could never have cut it as an other ranker, you know; he was far too untidy – although he had made the bed. When I saw him in the midst of the mess he had created – which included used clothes, empty beer bottles, and beans and corned beef cans – I felt almost sorry for him: the word slob sprang to mind. Verily.

He said, ‘Sorry about the mess. I moved in for a couple of days to get some peace.’ Then he added more truthfully, ‘Small falling out with the memsahib.’

‘Nothing to do with the taste of fresh fish, I trust, sir?’

‘Fucked if I know, Bassett. Same as all of our arguments. We’re both probably arguing about something different, and neither of us can quite see what. Don’t get married, Bassett.’

‘I think that I’d have to ask your permission anyway, sir.’

‘And I’d bloody well say no; what’s more, you’d thank me for it, later.’

At least he was lobbing the ball back over the net to me as far as this conversation went. His face had stopped ticcing for the time being. I looked at his spread of detritus and told him, ‘I don’t want you to think that we begrudge the space, and all that, sir, but haven’t they created something called an officers’ mess to provide persons of your station with accommodation among other persons of your station?’

‘Yes, but if I went there then people would know.’

‘People will know here, sir; or don’t NCOs count as people any longer?’

He looked uncomfortable, as had been my intention: I wanted rid of the bastard.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s all over. Storm in a teacup really.’

‘I’m really pleased about that, sir.’

‘Don’t be such a patronizing little git, Bassett.’

‘OK, sir.’

‘I’ll send someone over to get my things.’

‘OK, sir.’

‘What’s this “OK, OK”? You’re mixing with too many Yanks, Bassett. I hear things as well, you know.’

‘OK, sir.’

Then a copper of mean rank cycled over from the guardhouse with a message from Alex. The note he handed me was sweat damp from his progress.

I asked him, ‘What did you do to him to deserve this?’

‘Beat him a game of Chaser, didn’t I, Sergeant.’

‘Dunno; did you?’

He wasn’t amused, and couldn’t follow the conversation: he would make a good high-ranking cop after the war, I thought.

I said, ‘Yeah. He’s not a good loser, is he? Thanks for the note. Take it easy on the way back.’

Alex’s note read: Please phone woman named Emily – American Red Cross Officers’ Club at Bedford. This is the provost service, not your bloody messenger service! Speak to me about P.

He hadn’t signed it. People like Bluto don’t.

I walked into Bawne for the exercise, and used the new telephone call box near the church. When I got through to the club at Bedford, Emily said, ‘Hi. Thanks for getting right back to me.’ It took me a few seconds to try out the words in their new running order. They seemed to fit, so I filed them away. She continued, ‘You do remember me?’

‘Of course I do. You joined me up in your club as a gesture of solidarity with the working class.’

She laughed that great laugh I remembered.

‘No. It was nothing to do with that commie claptrap – it was because I liked you. Listen: Lee Miller’s staying here tomorrow: have you heard of her?’

‘Glenn Miller’s wife?’

‘Christ no. Glenn stays here all the time, but he never brings Helen.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Glenn Miller’s wife. Look, are you following this?’

‘I don’t think so. Hang on.’ I put more change in the telephone and pressed the button.

‘Still there?’ Emily said.

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘Lee’s a famous war photographer. Probably the most famous in the States. She’s over from Europe for a few days to do a series of aircrew photographs for Vogue magazine: she’s going to change her sponsorship to the AAF and promised them some army publicity shots of British and American aircrew together. Guess who got the job of rounding up some Brits? I thought of you first.’

‘And I’m the Chinese Emperor.’

‘Seriously Charlie; and there’s a party here afterwards with a special bar.’

‘Then count me in. I shall be proud to represent my country at competitive drinking with my American cousins. I’ll put it in my logbook as essential liaison duties.’

‘Call it what you like, brother; just be here. I’ll send you transport at, say, 1500 tomorrow.’

‘Quite the organizer, aren’t you? What’s the rest of your name?’

‘Rea; and, yes, organizing’s what they pay me for.’

Bushes’ bag of bolts was outside our hut when I returned: the car was untenanted, but the hut wasn’t. My irritation at Bushes’ return was mixed with relief that he was moving out: it turned to wariness as soon as I saw that it was his wife, not him.

‘Mrs Delve?’ I said.

She was back in WVS standard sexless dark blues, standing between the beds, looking as if she couldn’t make up her mind about something.

‘Don’t be a pain, Charlie. I told you to call me Jennifer.’

‘I think that I prefer Mrs Delve. That way I know where I am with you.’

‘You’re in your billet, and so am I – although technically I should imagine that I’m out of order; unchaperoned.’

‘I’m here,’ I blurted out, cursing myself inside.

‘So you are. Which bed is yours?’

I pointed at the one nearest to her. ‘That one: you were right.’

‘You don’t keep much, do you? No photographs of family, or pin-up girls?’ She paused as if a thought had just occurred to her. ‘I say, you’re not one of that ghastly Quelch’s little catamites, are you?’

‘No. You’re the third person to ask me that.’

‘Sorry. No photographs of girlfriend or family?’

‘No girlfriend. Nearly no family. Most of them were killed a couple of months back.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be: I’m killing other men’s families in Germany every night, after all.’

‘That’s different.’

‘I wonder . . . I shouldn’t imagine they’d think so.’ I wanted to change the angle of the conversation. ‘Did you come to see me, or to collect the squadron leader’s things?’

She looked away from me as she answered, which was disconcerting: it was if she was speaking to someone who wasn’t there.

‘Both. Conny asked me to clear up after him. He’s like a child about everything except running a squadron – it’s the only thing he can do. He said that there was just you here, and that it would be less embarrassing for him if his stuff was cleared away before the others came back from leave. I thought it was a chance to clear the air – between us, I mean. I don’t know what happened to make us so uncomfortable and snappy with each other, but I’m not enjoying it. I find myself plotting a course around the station in a way that ensures you and I don’t bump into one another.’ She gave a bitter little laugh – it had a very feminine and vulnerable ring, compared to Emily’s.

‘If it helps, I’m not enjoying it either. You either snub me altogether, or play the grand duchess,’ I said.

‘I know. I can’t seem to help it.’

‘For what it’s worth, I’m glad you came here: it was brave.’

‘Me too.’

‘You didn’t have to say that.’

‘Neither did you.’

She was obviously one of those good-at-pauses people. She turned slowly, then sat on the edge of my bed, facing me across the aisle, which seemed about as wide as the Rhine. She nodded at Pete’s cabinet radio on the shelf behind his bed. ‘Does that work?’

‘It’s probably one of the best in Cambridgeshire. We picked up Tokyo Rose on it one night.’

‘Put some music on.’

The radio seemed inappropriately loud in a room virtually empty of people, so I hurriedly racked the volume back. It was the Orpheans playing dance music from Afternoon at the Savoy.

Jennifer stood up, decision made. ‘Dance with me,’ she said, and we met halfway, in the corridor between the beds, dancing two slow numbers with her head against my shoulder. One of them was ‘Stardust’, and the other was ‘Serenade in Blue’. The singer sounded like that Frank Sinatra who used to sing with Tommy Dorsey.

Afterwards I sat because my legs were shaking. Eyes down.

She said, ‘Thank you. When this war is over, I’m going to spend thousands on pretty, frivolous dresses, and live at parties. I will dance with all the boys left alive. Have you thought about after the war? Most people do, but they don’t like talking about it.’

‘Only that I want my possessions to be few, and wholly functional. I don’t want to be weighed down by things that don’t do anything.’

‘Such as?’

‘I want a jeep rather than a car: no frills – they’ll be cheap after the war. Nothing soft, silly or decorative like that Austin Seven I’ve crawled around in all week.’

‘I rather like it.’

‘I think that you’re supposed to; that’s the point.’

She had made no move to collect up her husband’s debris.

‘I sat down because my legs were trembling. It’s like flying over Hamburg,’ I told her.

‘I know. You didn’t have to tell me that.’ She did the pause thing again, then asked, ‘I suppose that this is just plain old-fashioned lust, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I hadn’t really thought about it,’ I said. Liar. It sounded cool until my voice began to shake.

‘Well, you’d better have me then, hadn’t you?’

But there was something resigned about how she said it, and perfunctory about what we did next.

I don’t know how long I took. Not long enough, I suspect. Being given total freedom to do as I pleased with a grown woman’s body was a recent discovery for me. Within my narrow range of experience, I thought hers quite splendid.

Afterwards I sat on the edge of the bed beside her, running my fingers around her stomach, and stroking her navel. I thought that I had never seen a person as beautiful, or as deliciously wanton, and said so, aloud, without intending to.

I helped her pile Bushes’ things into the old kit bag he had brought them in. I found it under number eight. We didn’t exchange more than half a dozen words before she drove off, but I couldn’t help smiling a lot, and eventually neither could she. After that I switched frequency on the radio to pick up an American jazz programme, and whistled away with a black singer named Fats Waller. I even cleared away the Boss’s empty tins and dirty plates.

I tell a lie: there was something else. Before I closed the car door for her I told her, ‘The Boss thinks that you’re fucking the other officers, and it’s making him unhappy. Tell him he’s wrong.’

‘What if he’s right?’ In four cheeky words I had a glimpse of a woman I hadn’t met.

‘Then lie to him.’ But would she?

‘I’m not having sex with anyone else.’

‘You are now,’ I told her.

There it was again. That smile. Later that night, with the hut blacked out, and the Pink Pole’s wireless set burbling away in the background, I picked out ‘Serenade in Blue’ again – only this time it was Glenn Miller’s people. I lifted my arms and danced alone in the corridor formed by the eight beds. It must have looked pretty odd, but I was feeling pleased with myself.

The transport that Emily Rea sent for me was piloted by a familiar figure: the same Master or Technical Sergeant, Thomsett. This time he had a covered jeep.

‘Hi, Tommo. You come here more often, and they’ll give you a pass,’ I said.

‘Got one.’ He held up the buff cardboard ticket, and added, ‘You never know when it’ll come in handy. I cut a deal with some big policeman you got.’

‘What for?’

‘Meat. Quarter of a smoked pig – for delivery tomorrow.’

I laughed. That would be Alex.

‘Come on. I’ll show you why you don’t need a pass,’ and we drove out of the gap in the wire behind the Nissen hut. I closed it carefully behind us because that was the deal; we were never to rub the provos’ noses in it.

Thomsett wasn’t impressed. ‘Yeah; we got a few of those,’ he told me.

In the jeep I said, ‘I was with some of your guys recently. They seemed to think that you’re some sort of gangster. Al Capone or someone like that.’

‘Shucks.’

I laughed at that. ‘That’s what Gabby Hayes always says in Westerns, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Those guys at Thurleigh Field: they’re some comedians, right?’

‘They seem to think you have it all sewn up.’

Tommo chewed on his dead cigar in silence for a few heartbeats, then he asked me, ‘You get their names: these comedians?’

‘I don’t think I ought to tell you that, do you?’

He grinned at me when he should have been watching the road. ‘No: you better hadn’t, I guess.’

There were three Sherman tanks parked in the road outside the ARC Officers’ Club in Bedford. The road around one of them was cracking up where it was sinking into the storm drain, or the sewer. A small old man in a pinstripe suit circled it nervously carrying a clipboard. He had the drooping moustache and look of a local council officer; he was far too late to prevent the damage. The club lobby was crowded with young American tankies in fatigue suits, and something like soft leather flying helmets. Emily Rea emerged laughing from the scrum, dragging one of the soldiers with her. He was at least six feet four.

‘Hi, Charlie. This is Albert Grayling. He and his boys are moving south. They’re going over soon. When he phones me for accommodation he forgets to say that they’d be bringing their tanks along with them.’

Albert said, ‘Hi,’ and shook hands. ‘I’m Albie.’

‘I’m Charlie. One of your tanks is settling into the drain in the road outside, I think. You’ll find a council official with a clipboard out there. He’s got you surrounded, but I think that you’ve got him worried.’

Emily laughed the laugh. ‘I’ll get him in here, and get one of the girls to buy him a drink.’

Albie had a nasty fresh gash in his forehead, just below the edge of his leather helmet. It had obviously bled hard and long, and was just beginning to congeal. I pointed at it.

‘Goddamned Ronsons,’ he said, ‘were never made for people my size: Texas boys joined up to ride horses, not iron boxes. Would you believe that the American Red Cross Club can’t produce a nurse or a goddamned medic?’

Emily said, ‘I’ll make a note of that. Get through to the bar Charlie; I’ll catch you later.’

‘What’s a Ronson?’ I asked Albie.

‘Goddamned Sherman tank. Krauts call them Ronsons after the cigarette lighters, because they burn so well if they hit them with a decent anti-tank shell. We also burn, but not so good.’

‘What can you do about it?’

‘Make sure there’s another tank between you and the Kraut gun; apart from that, getting legless a lot seems to help.’

Emily said, ‘Don’t you believe him Charlie.’

‘I’ll think about that,’ I said, not because I meant it, but because it was better than saying nothing.

There was another scrum at the bar, and I recognized Sandy Lyon, who flew with Peter Wynn.

‘Is the galloping major here with you?’ I asked him.

Lyon looked at me, looked away, then looked at me again. ‘No. He’s got a lotta letters to write. He’s on a pass from this.’

I tried again, but the guy had something like the twitch, and definitely didn’t want to talk about it. So I changed back.

‘Who’s Lee Miller?’

‘I am,’ came a voice from somewhere round about my right ear, so I swung and found myself with a woman about my size. She had a French cigarette, a tobacco-bashed-up voice, and a battered green overall that matched it: it had a patch saying War Correspondent sewn sloppily on one shoulder. She had a nice mobile mouth, but crooked teeth, and although you could see that she had been very beautiful not so long ago, her face was now a bit used up, and she sported a cold sore where her lips joined port side. ‘You’re one of Emily’s Brits; I’m gonna make you famous.’

‘You’re Lee Miller?’

‘Pleased to meet you, Biffo,’ she said, and stuck out a hand. It had a glass of bourbon in it. Her hair was probably a fine blonde when it was clean – it didn’t look as if it had been in several days. Maybe she was also telepathic; she added, ‘You’re gonna have to wait an hour. First I get outside this drink, then I get inside a tub – then I get you on a roll of film inside my camera. OK?’

I grinned. It was a free bar: I could cope. Two other Brits at the bar were also aircrew: I guessed that we were all flying the same trip. There was a tall, brown-haired French Letter type with full wings, and a furlong of coloured ribbons all over his left tit. He had a huge moustache that made Bushes’ splendid effort look like eyebrows. On Bushes, I thought, the moustache looked impressive: on this fellow it looked ridiculous; deranged – and I wondered if anyone had had the heart to tell him that. His colleagues sported the N badge with single wing: navigator.

Moustaches spoke first, ‘Hello, old boy,’ but he didn’t like the look of the stripes on my arm, so turned back to the American officer he had been talking to, leaving me with his navigator, a flight sergeant like me, who glanced briefly at the ceiling as he handed me a drink. Yeah; I could cope.

‘Charlie Bassett,’ I said to the nav.

‘Bourne. George Bourne,’ he said.

‘I fly from a place that sounds like that. Who’s your fool?’

‘I fly with Braddock. He flies brilliantly, but he’s the dumbest thing they’ve sent into the air for England yet. VC material, and so vain you could drown a pig in him. Refuses to use his Christian names – practising for his earldom. He already has enough gongs to have spare ones to wear in the bath.’

‘How many trips you got left?’

‘It doesn’t work like that in our mob. You just fly until you have no more left in you.’

‘Pathfinder then?’

‘Yeah. Still can’t believe we volunteered.’

Braddock turned back to us: the Yank who turned away from him had a look of relief on his face. ‘You talking about me again, George?’ he said, and held out his hand to me, saying, ‘Braddock, old boy.’

‘Bassett, old boy.’ I put back. ‘They named me after the dog.’

‘Oh, I see. Bassett what?’

‘See?’ said Bourne.

Braddock told me an interesting story when he found out I was stationed at Bawne. A week earlier they had lobbed a cookie between a couple of Flak ships outside Kiel, so that three kites from our squadron could creep through the gap and lay magnetic mines into the sea space. He told me that the clever ploy had been their wingco’s idea, and that it had worked so well that the old man was sure to get a gong for it. That was interesting. I said that I’d heard about the op, but I didn’t tell him my part in it. Gongs seemed to feature often in his conversation, and well up in his personal value system. When he looked pointedly at the ribbonless space above my left pocket I explained.

‘I had the offer, but I sent it back. We’re pacifists in my squadron: we don’t believe in the war.’

The photography in a side room – like a chapel without the paraphernalia – was a sombre affair. Emily Rea mixed us up with five Americans: they all looked bone-tired, and embarrassed. We made meaningless conversation whilst the lady with the lens moved around us shooting. She made no demands on us at all – at first she recorded what was there, not what she made up. I couldn’t see what she was looking for. The camera – it was probably a solid Rolleiflex – looked big in her small hands, and her washed hair shone like cloth of gold.

Then, just as it all seemed pointless, she went to the smallest and youngest of the Yanks. He was a co-pilot who looked barely old enough to be out of school. She kissed him, then stood back off us and clicked her shutter at him again and again. That must have been too much, because soon after that he started to shake, and then to cry, and it all broke up. The camera carried on clicking, even as Emily was hugging the kid out of the room to somewhere private to clean up.

‘You got sniper’s eyes, Lee,’ said Peter Wynn, who was standing in the doorway with a mug of coffee in his hand. He noticed me, and said, ‘Hi, Charlie – can’t you leave our women alone?’

I had a drink with Lee Miller. I told her a bad joke about Don Bradman, and then I told her about the dead radio operator standing up to his waist in Alan’s Field at Crifton.

‘I wish I had shot that,’ she said.

I was bloody horrified. ‘Then what would you have done?’

‘I would have gone somewhere to throw up. Then I would have gone out and done it again.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s my best job. What’s your best job?’

‘I talk to people on a radio.’

‘Nice job. Don’t give up on it.’

‘Nor you.’

She smiled when I said that. I knew that there was no chance she’d give up. A small American with thick black hair, receding hairline, big nose and bigger spectacles fitted himself alongside us at the bar. He had the War Correspondent shoulder flash as well, but he was wearing a tailored uniform. Lee introduced him as ‘My conscience, Dave Scherman.’

I told him that my boss, Grease, occasionally tried to stick that label on me, but that I didn’t let him get away with it. He had a gentle speaking voice.

‘Your boss probably doesn’t need a conscience. Lee does.’

After that they told me about their work, and seeing the world through a lens. Lee said that she’d been some sort of a photographer’s model years ago so that she also saw things from the subject’s point of view. They exchanged a glance between them that said there was more to the story than that, but that I wasn’t getting it.

‘For a few years 1928, 1930, Lee was the best known clothes horse in America. Her face was all over Vogue magazine. Now she’s their most famous photographer,’ said Scherman.

‘Dave’s better. I get the art, but he gets the story,’ Lee said.

I didn’t know what they were talking about. ‘I was four years old in 1928,’ I said.

‘. . . and I was already 400,’ said Lee, suddenly moody.

They unwound later, and told me outrageous stories about artists and photographers I’d never heard of: Lee seemed to have lived several lives already – which put something into my memory. She held her hand with its drink in a heavy glass protectively across her body, and although her body stance looked relaxed you could sense the sprung tension in her – like a cat, fight or flight was written all over her. And so that’s how I’ll always think of her. I will never forget either of them: they had carved old love in the spaces between to a shape you could almost reach out and touch.

I awoke, scared, at 0215 – I’ve always instinctively known the time. The woman I hadn’t really heard at Crifton was outside the hut singing ‘The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo’. One thing I wasn’t going to do was get up to let her in. I threw a couple of shovelfuls of slack into the stove’s gob, and left the air slide open to roar it up. While I was doing this the singing stopped, or faded rather. Think me daft if you like, but the next thing that came into my mind was Grace – a surging roller of unselfish affection, and simultaneous shame at the way things had been left between us.

What happened to me then was sudden and unexpected: what happened is that I grew up a bit – just like that, the Great One would have said. I know that some people mature slowly, and that some never mature at all, but I can still recall the odd feeling of sitting alongside the stove – one side of me roasting hot, and the other cold – suddenly finding myself to be something approximating an adult. And I thought that the new me was going to turn out to be a lot more sensible than his predecessor, because he fancied a piece of toast, and went looking for the makings.

I dreamed, or I awoke just once again before morning. Black Francie was standing at the end of my bed. All his bits were back together again. He didn’t say anything, just grinned like the Devil. I grinned back and rolled over: he didn’t scare me. Just as I was sliding into sleep I had the oddest of thoughts: I knew that I was ready to fly again.

In the morning I breakfasted in the sergeants’ mess for the first time in weeks, it seemed. The young girl was back serving tables, one-handed because her arm was in a sling. I decided to tell Grease about it before he found out for himself. The girl looked more waif-like than ever: younger than my sister, and she was still going to school – or would have been. I was relieved to see several faces I knew, and at least two complete crews I had seen before: it must have been a good week.

Hodges, the sergeant sparks on X-X-ray, wandered over with a huge wad and jam in his hand. ‘What ho, Charlie. What you been up to?’

‘Leave.’

‘Yeah, but what you been up to?’

‘Give me a clue, Hodgo.’

‘That big bastard of a provo has been in here nearly every day looking for you.’

‘That’s all right. It’s not about me.’

‘Good show. He looks a mean bastard to cross. I should sort it out if I was you.’

‘I will. Don’t worry.’

You took things like that from Hodges because he was the oldest operational flier on the station. His father was a chief air raid warden somewhere on the south coast. Soon after we had been posted to Bawne Hodges had got the CO’s permission to show his old man around. What I remember most easily about the officious old bugger is that he wore his dark blue ARP battledress and white warden’s steel helmet throughout, as if the Kraut was going to visit us any minute.

In the mess lobby, alongside the rows of hooks for coats and caps, there were two telephones in man-sized three-ply boxes, which gave the impression of a degree of privacy. One was only connected to phones on the station, and on the other you could dial out: that one was locked off whenever the station went to war – say every other afternoon. On the internal one I phoned the guardhouse, got Alex, and told him I’d be in later that morning; with the latter I phoned Crifton.

Barnes answered. He told me that the body had been collected from Alan’s Field, and that a salvage crew had dug a huge pit where they were burying what was left of the two Lancasters.

When I asked to speak to Grace he said, ‘I’m pleased about that Mr Charles. She isn’t down yet. Shall I call her, or could you telephone again later?’

‘Get her out of bed, Barnsey.’ Bombs armed.

‘With pleasure Mr Charles.’ Bomb doors open.

It seemed a long wait: I managed to whistle most of ‘Minnie The Moocher’.

Grace yawned, and said, ‘Yes; what is it?’

‘I just wanted to tell you that I love you, and will always love you. That doesn’t mean I won’t behave badly, or stupidly from time to time. It just means that I love you – just as you are; can’t help it. It’s something that’s fixed in me, and I can’t do anything about it. I just wanted to tell you that exactly as it was, with no other words in-between.’ Bombs gone.

She didn’t react immediately, and when she did her accent slipped.

‘You mad fool, Charlie Bassett.’ I guessed that the accent was Durham, near one of her father’s first factories, where she had been born. Then she laughed, but not unkindly. After that she said, ‘If I hadn’t laughed, I would have cried. I’m very glad you called. Is this your last day?’

‘Yes. There’ll be a formation fly-past in the bar tonight.’

‘Are you coming over?’

‘Maybe, but probably not. I have to see the police about Pete – fuck knows what he’s been up to this time – and I wanted to clean the hut up before everyone gets back: like a fresh start. I may not have time after that. It doesn’t matter: there’ll be dozens of other times.’

‘Yes. I know there will.’

Neither of us knew what to say after that. Then Grace sighed and said, ‘I’ll be here alone all day. Daddy’s gone off to London; to help Winston with something, I think. If you can’t get away, you can phone me later.’ It was odd to understand that Crifton’s servants didn’t count for anything. Even with a dozen of them there Grace still thought of herself as alone.

Bluto was testy.

‘I’ve been looking for you all bloody week.’

‘Hodges told me this morning.’

‘He loves giving the bad news, doesn’t he?’

‘Don’t be hard on him. He’s a good sparks, and almost old enough to cop off flying altogether. Give me some char, Alex, and tell me what’s the matter. What’s Pete actually done?’ I loved the glass-house tea: they made it strong enough to dissolve an EPNS spoon in; I’d noted the steaming mug in front of him.

‘Get it yourself.’ He indicated a stained urn standing on a stove in the outer office. ‘And don’t nick too much milk or sugar. We’re short.’

‘We’re not,’ I told him; ‘I’ll send some round.’

It was good to put the knife in sometimes.

‘Nobody seems to know what he’s done,’ Alex told me. ‘That’s why I’m asking you. There’s this copper, who’s probably Special Branch, and a fellow from the Polish Government in Exile in Scotland who looks like a comic-strip spy. Dark felt hat with a big floppy brim: the guv’nor says he’s watched too many Conrad Veight films. We think that if it was a simple case of thievery, black market or a paternity suit then the local police would have been round here, and we could have fixed it. We think that it’s got to be political.’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but we still don’t lock people up for their political opinions in this country, do we?’

‘Not unless they’re Fascists, although Winston had some Scottish Nationalists detained last year. We’ve a small camp full of them somewhere: heedering and hodering away to one another.’

‘I didn’t hear about that.’

‘You wouldn’t, would you? You haven’t heard it now.’

‘What were they doing?’

‘Trying to negotiate a separate peace deal – it is alleged – with Adolf.’

‘Bollocks! Nobody’s that stupid!’

‘I’m just telling you that we live in trying times.’

‘Pete is not a Fascist: he loathes the Germans. That’s at least 150 per cent true. He loathes them in a way that you couldn’t understand. He would eat their babies.’

‘Yes. That’s what everyone else says. He almost got you killed, hating the Germans, didn’t he?’

‘You heard about that?’

‘Your CO told my boss by way of illustration. We are reasonably certain of his anti-German credentials.’

‘So, what do you think, Alex?’

‘I go along with the political theory. No matter how much he scares the Axis, for some reason he scares his own people even more. You’ll have to keep an eye out for him.’

‘Since when have I been doing anything else?’

When I returned to the hut I found the post bike, cleaned, greased and repainted in a proper camouflage scheme propped against it, and a neat new sign, in RAF stencil on the outer storm porch door. It read The Grease Pit. I guess that the skipper must have commissioned that from Chiefy Bryan before he left. Cleaning the Grease Pit was easier than I anticipated. Everyone had managed to make their beds before they left, so it was a matter of piling the chairs on them, opening all the doors, and sweeping the shit out. I had let the stove die, so I was able to clean that as well, and set it up for the active winter already running down on us. We could be well into it before we finished the tour, I realized. Soap wasn’t a problem – although it was for the rest of the population. Pete had a sweet-smelling box with half a hundred bars of it under his bedside locker. I cut one of the bars in half, and dropped them into the two toilets. If they were left to dissolve long enough the first flush would do the business. Barnes’s little team would have been proud of me.

The place was Bristol fashion when Jennifer Delve walked in. I hadn’t heard her drive up because she had cycled. She didn’t say Hello or any of the other things which people say when they meet: she only said, ‘Charlie.’

I looked up from making my own bed, which I had left until last, in order to air the sheets and the two coarse wool blankets. I probably did do the hello bit, but I can’t remember. I know that I asked where Bushes was, and she said something like, ‘He’s had to go over to wing all day. I think you might have a busy week.’

‘Good. The quicker the trips come on, the sooner they’re over. Roll on the end of the tour.’

She said that she wished Conny would stop flying, and then she asked me where the others were, and I told her that they weren’t due until later.

When a woman has made her mind up, I found out then, she’s like a B-17 with two engines out: she’s going to go down on you, however hard you try to keep her flying. As a consequence of that . . . how would Jane Austen, or one of the Brontë women have written it – reader, I took her? Don’t knock it. We’d mashed my bed up between us, and she remade it before she left. That was a nice domestic touch, I thought. She fucked me from underneath, her skirt around her waist again, with a keen, noisy abandon, and hated herself for it afterwards just the way I wanted. I thought I could go back for more of that. She shed a couple of tears – just the one on each cheek. I was interested to note that it didn’t move me at all. I licked them off: they weren’t even salty to the taste.

We were sitting around the big oval table in the pub at Eltisley, the name of which always escapes me these days.

‘You get your end away then, young Charlie?’ Grease asked me. I had to be careful because a straight yes would lead to a guessing game around the table, trying to flush the fox from his den.

I settled for a half-truth instead, and said, ‘I ended up in an American club in Bedford. Do you remember those nurses we met in London? There were loads of them there.’

‘Jammy little bugger,’ the Toff told me.

Everyone had got in early enough for an end-of-leave binge. Grease had been first home, but I hadn’t wasted drinking time bringing him up to date, except to tell him about the state’s new interest in our Pole.

‘No point in asking you, Pete. When didn’t you get your end away?’ Grease said.

‘Not before I was eleven years old.’

‘So tell us why these secret policemen have been snooping around asking questions about you? Are you in trouble?’

‘No,’ Piotr said, and when no one else said anything, sighed and filled the space with, ‘You will have heard of Sikorsky?’

‘Yes,’ Marty said, but Grease shot him the shut-up glance; he wanted Pete to go on talking. Pete did.

‘My General; Wladyslaw Sikorsky. Poland’s torch. He died in a plane at Gib. More than a year ago. It blew up just after takeoff, and fell into the sea. Such a small bomb: so discreet, so British. Four people drowned, and two people survived: the pilot and another passenger: your friend Piotr was the passenger: his survival was unexpected and they don’t like witnesses. Witnesses worry them sometimes.’

‘OK,’ said Grease.

‘Also the Government in Exile is rich in luxury goods, through the good offices of our American allies, but kept deliberately short of real spending money – also because of the influence of our allies. They keep us dependent. I convert one product into the other for them. I know how to buy and sell. I balance supply and demand. I know who gets what, who sells it, who buys it, and how much for. I know whose fingers are in the honey pot, and how far down. Because I do it with them. That will worry them . . . sometimes.’

‘OK,’ said Grease.

‘Also before the Germans came, 95 per cent of the land in Poland was owned by 4 per cent of the population. When I was a student I wrote a small book saying that that was wrong; that things would have to change. You see, I am that unusual Pole who hates Germans more than I hate the Russians. Most Poles hate the Russians more than they hate the Kraut. That worries them sometimes too.’

‘OK,’ said Grease.

‘And also I know which pretend countess is fucking which pretend duke, or which minister in the Government in Exile, because I am fucking her also.’

‘OK,’ said Grease, ‘you can stop now; we get the picture.’

‘There is something else. When your honourable RAF officers painted Poland’s flags on Harriet’s tits, my people think that is political too. I think that also worries them.’

‘Are you saying that the authorities are investigating you for all of these reasons, Pete?’ I asked.

‘No. Only one of them probably: difficulty is deciding which one.’

‘Just so long as we know that you’re not a rapist or a murderer,’ Grease said.

‘I am not a rapist,’ Piotr said very firmly.

It was then that I remembered the voice of the woman who had answered the telephone when I had called Pete to warn him. Her name was Jean Shore: Abbot’s girlfriend. Pete had said that she was really Abbot’s wife, and that he was going to buy the Singer from her.

Piotr was looking at my face as this memory jelled. Maybe he saw something there. He spoke directly to me. ‘That is right Charlie; I am not a rapist, but if God provides me with an opportunity, he expects me to take it. You will understand: isn’t it the same for you too?’

I probably blushed as I said, ‘Yes. It’s the same for everyone these days.’

For once Grease didn’t know what we were talking about, and I enjoyed his brief frown. It was time for a change of course.

‘What about you, Skipper?’ I asked Grease, ‘Did your brother line you up a big, bouncy bed wearing a Wren’s uniform?’

‘One day, Charlie, I’ll tell you all about Portsmouth girls.’

Yeah. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fly. That was always our excuse.

Just before we all turned in I went over and sat on the edge of Grease’s bed because I didn’t want any of the others to hear.

‘That kid in the mess is back, with her arm in a sling. She smiles, but nearly jumps out of her skin every time anyone looks at her. The fat bastard must still be knocking her about,’ I said.

Pete had overheard: in truth, he missed very little. ‘Perhaps some women like it that way,’ he said.

Sometimes you became aware that Pete lived on a different fucking planet to the rest of us.

‘Don’t be so bloody soft,’ I said, ‘she’s English,’ and spoke loud enough for the others to stop what they were doing, and look up. Pete bastard-smiled at me. I’ve told you before that I never liked it when Pete smiled his bastard smile at anyone like that.

‘Put it in the can,’ Grease said. ‘Hit the sheets everyone, and no farting. Air test tomorrow.’

The weather front swept over us in the middle of the night, and then stopped dead – just as if God had targeted Cambridgeshire for a taste of eternal wrath. One of the things that Cambridgeshire taught me about God is that he is inordinately fond of rain. Like old man Heinz, he has at least fifty-seven varieties of it.

I was woken by the water drumming on the Grease Pit’s curved iron walls. I got up to bank the stove, and went back to bed. I thought of Tuesday standing out there in the rain, and hoped it wouldn’t get under her skin as easily as it did mine.

Grease came back from his run soaked to the skin, and with news. ‘No flying. Probably for two days: there’s a lot more of this shit out in the Atlantic waiting to wash over us.’

In the red brick palace the New Order Board bore an Order of the Day which said that the discipline officer would conduct PE for all ranks. The DO stood alongside it in his small kit. Then he ran away after Quelch ate the notice and tried to kiss him.

‘No flying today I guess,’ Quelch said.

‘We could have a dance tonight,’ I said.

‘Why Charlie, how nice: I didn’t think you cared.’

‘No. I mean all of us.’

‘Better and better,’ said Quelchy.

Grease said, ‘Leave Charlie alone; he’s ours. You’d better scram. I can see the DO on his way back with a couple of coppers.’

Alex in his police uniform, complete with glossy white battle bowler, had brought his smallest provo with him. They looked like that Victorian print of the two dogs, Dignity and Impudence, which always hung in your front room. They were as rainswept as the DO: the water streamed off them.

Alex, tense, asked Grease, ‘Where’s this bloody OOD, Sergeant?’

‘Dunno,’ said Grease. ‘Never seen one. One was never here.’

‘Where’s that fairy Quelch?’

‘Dunno. Who’s Quelch? Don’t believe in fairies sergeant.’

‘You’re fucking well under arrest,’ snarled Alex.

‘What about me?’ the Toff asked him. ‘I don’t believe in fairies either.’

‘And you.’

‘And me,’ I said. It had been a calculated gamble, but about another thirty voices began to chime in, and chairs began to hit the deck as aircrew got to their feet.

‘Goodo,’ Grease told Alex, ‘if I’m under arrest, perhaps they’ll let you fly our kite to Berlin tomorrow instead of me.’

‘Fuck the lot of you,’ Bluto said. I think that was the end of the mutiny. If he had in fact arrested us, in a legal sense, then I guess that I’m still a fugitive from justice, because I was never unarrested. I don’t know why, but eventually we were the only crew left in the mess.

We were only mildly concerned when Alex and buddy came bursting back into the room.

‘Charlie, I need you quick – I need aircrew; anybody,’ he gasped, then turned and ran out of the door again. Grease looked at us and shrugged, but led the discreet stampede in pursuit. The rain had eased, but only just, and there was a Thorneycroft lorry outside. Alex was in the back buckling on a side arm, and making a mess of it. His nervous sidekick was cocking and uncocking a small machine gun, which was either a Sten or a Stirling: I never did learn the difference. We piled in alongside them: I fixed Alex’s holster belt for him as the lorry careered away in the rain.

‘What’s the problem?’ the Toff shouted.

Alex’s dwarf said, ‘I think we been invaded, Sarge.’

‘Fuck that,’ murmured Grease. ‘I want to get out again.’

He was too late. The lorry was already pulling up after less than half a mile. We were at one end of the cross runway. So was an aeroplane, which we approached gingerly: that is to say that we all stayed behind Alex. The kite was painted in a light grey wash and decorated with hundreds of dark green squiggles. That was new to us, but the big black crosses on its sides, and the swastika on its tail were a dead giveaway. Visitors. As we closed in on it, trying to avoid the standing water, we could see brown-clad occupants moving about behind the perspex.

‘If any of those bloody machine guns move, just hit the deck and stay there,’ Alex muttered.

Grease ignored him. He walked past to stand looking up at the cockpit, and waved up at it. The pilot slid back a small square window, and shouted a spiky improbable something in weary German. Getting no response from anyone below, he tried again in French, and then accented but clear English.

‘Yes? What is it that you want?’

‘We surrender,’ Grease said.

‘No we surrender.’

‘I said it first. You must take us to Germany. It rains too much in England.’

‘This year it rains too much in Germany also. Is this England?’

‘Definitely.’

‘This is a pity. I thought it might be Holland.’

‘Holland is 250 miles in that direction.’ Grease pointed roughly to the south-east, and added helpfully, ‘We think that it’s raining there too.’

‘That also is a pity,’ the German said, ‘perhaps you could spare me some gas?’

‘I’m afraid not. We need ours for bombing Germany.’

‘That also is a pity. We are German, you see.’

‘I had guessed that.’

‘Do you think that I should shoot my navigator? He is an offizier, you know.’

‘That would waste a perfectly useless officer. We could exchange him for one of ours if you liked? Fair swap.’

‘I think not. I suppose that your offiziers are stupid also?’ It figured: a lot of German pilot types were sergeants, like Grease.

‘You got it, Fritz. You keep yours: Lufthansa will need him after the war.’

‘For what? Flying passengers to the wrong countries? I think not.’ Then he said, ‘I was not trained for this. Probably the war is over for me. I still think perhaps I should shoot the navigator.’

‘Why don’t you come to breakfast instead, and think about it?’

‘OK.’

He slid the perspex shut again. Germans are good decision makers. The crew of five dropped down through a trapdoor under the nose of the aircraft, on to the wet tarmac of Old England. Except for a gunner of forty or so they all looked like scared children. So did we. Alex’s pal’s hands were shaking, and the automatic he held was shaking with them: I gently pushed down the barrel until it was pointing at the ground.

Grease shook the pilot’s hand and said, ‘Welcome to England, and thank you for the aeroplane.’

‘Think nothing of it, Sergeant. Consider it recompense for those you leave in Germany every night.’

Who said the Kraut doesn’t have a sense of humour? Although I don’t know why Grease didn’t thump him for that one. One of the crew had a big black eye already; it was closing up on him. I think that he was the nav. Conroy moved forward to look after him.

At this point Alex decided he was able to speak again. ‘Well, fuck me gently,’ he said.

‘No, that’s Quelch’s job,’ I reminded him, and when he gave me the look, added, ‘Cheer up, Alex. You’ve just captured a Junkers 88. Bound to get a medal for that.’

We didn’t get to keep the Jerries for long: the officers came and invited them to breakfast in their mess. Which was more than they’d ever done for us.

Then some serious gentlemen from London spirited them away to the aircrew interrogation centre. We hung around the main gatehouse to see them go, but the lorry they were transported in had its tilt laced tightly shut. I threw the departing lorry an exaggerated Nazi salute, which annoyed our cops, and said, ‘Silly sods.’

The Toff whispered, ‘Bye-bye, Krauts,’ but because we were inside, they wouldn’t have heard him anyway.

Later someone told us that our bold Bushes was so pleased that he went into the small washroom alongside his office, and shaved his moustache off. Bush-free and as mad as a fucking daisy.

Back in the Grease Pit, relating the story to Marty and Pete, Fergal pointed out that we would need a new nickname for Bushes.

Pete shrugged and said, ‘Try Bushless.’ Then he asked me, ‘You still fancy his wife, Charlie?’

I can’t remember what I answered. I hope that I didn’t let her down and blush.

At 0730 I shook them awake individually – except Marty: I realized that there was no point. Grease was surprisingly good at weather for someone who wasn’t a native: he sniffed the drizzle while my head was in the fire bucket, and as I emerged said, ‘It’ll clear: we’ll get an air test in today. Loosen everyone up and be ready for ops tomorrow.’

‘I’ll get things moving. When do you want to fly?’

‘We’ll have half an hour on the ground at 1000; find out what the Chiefy has been doing to her since we’ve been away. Take-off at 1030 unless the Old Man says no: I’ll ask him: I want to see what he looks like with naked lips.’

Breakfast.

‘This is no bloody way to run a hotel,’ Fergal said. He was referring to a breakfast of spam fritters, bread and marge, and jam so old it was impossible to identify which fruit it was made from.

‘How is it that mine host here grows fatter and fatter, like Winston, while we’re eating this shite and growing thinner?’ Grease asked.

‘Obvious,’ said the Toff. ‘He’s eating something else, isn’t he? I’ll bet he never sits down to powdered egg and mashed potatoes.’

‘I thought you were going to do something about him, Skipper.’

‘Would you shut up if I came across with enough bacon, eggs, fresh vegetables and enough of a variety of meats to last us a month?’

‘Can you Skip?’

‘Depends. What have we got for barter, Pete?’

‘Mainly spirits. A load of vodka, some Portuguese brandy that came from a blockade runner, thirty of those white wool sweaters the underwater Blue Jobs wear . . . some parachute silk – not made up. Some car tyres. Give me a few days, and I’ll see what else Glasgow and Edinburgh can come up with. Will that do?’

Grease asked, ‘What’s it got to do with Glasgow and Edinburgh?’

‘When they say Polish Government in Exile they bloddy mean it! They exile us to Scotland. Didn’t you know that? Half Poland lives in Scotland this year.’

Air test. Tuesday was damp. Like all good whores, she was a bit clammy on the inside, and would be until the heater had been run full throttle for twenty minutes. That was a problem for me, because the heater fed from one of the Merlin engines, and its port into the aircraft interior was alongside my radios. I was going to have to cook inside my flying clothes, until we had the old girl dried out. I did have the option of wearing less, of course, but then what would happen if I had to bale out over the North Sea?

There was a click on the RT, and Piotr asked me, ‘Can you turn the heater right up when we get going, please, Charlie? There’s as much water inside the turret as there is outside: I can’t see a focking yard.’

‘OK, Pete – I’ve already set it to max.’

With my spare ear I heard Grease tell Fergal, ‘A rookie called Whittaker took Tuesday to Merseburg – never heard of it before. Apparently the Yanks are stonking hell out of it by daylight, whilst we stoke the ovens for them at night. We lost Porterman’s crew there.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Hey, Pete. Where’s Merseburg?’ Grease asked.

‘South of Berlin, Skipper, and not as far as Dresden: popular with the Yanks. There are a lot of guns at Merseburg. I think that they make things there. Better we go some other place.’

We heard Fergal and Grease reciting the prayer. As they ran the engines up Fergal clicked and said, ‘Starboard outer throttle, Skip: it feels a bit odd. As if it’s moving through the gate fractionally slower than the rest. It doesn’t feel smooth.’

‘OK. Watch it.’

The leave must have done him good, because he was calling for gear up before we crossed the boundary fence: a really flashy take-off. Then I was free to unplug, and climb up to the front office, and stand behind Grease. I felt happier these days, being able to see where we were going. I bent down and asked him where we were cleared for.

‘Northampton and East Anglia, but I thought we’d stooge over to Thurleigh, see if there’s anyone about and give them the old two-engine routine,’ he shouted.

The two-engined joke consisted of finding an American B-17 on air test, and flying up alongside him. The B-17 was underpowered compared with the Lanc, and we would demonstrate our superiority by cruising up behind, feathering two of our props and turning the taps off. Then we’d cruise past on only two engines, with two propellers windmilling in the breeze, but still overtaking him. Match that, baby. I moved back to the astrodome and watched the sky.

We were on a south-westerly leg when I caught a brief flash of light on my right and about four miles away, I’d guess.

‘Unknown, Skipper – three o’clock; our height, say three miles out now.’

‘OK, I can see him,’ Grease said.

I felt the gentle changes of trim as Marty, the Toff and the Pole swung their guns to cover the newcomer even though they had no bullets, and the corrections to compensate that Grease and Fergal made.

The unknown grew into a large, friendly B-17, just as we had hoped. It was flying an enormous lazy flat circuit centred on Thurleigh. We did the two-engine thing, but they must have seen it before, because just as we began to pull ahead everyone in the American pointedly looked in the opposite direction. So Grease throttled back, and he and the Yankee pilot then played chicken – they tucked in so close that one wing tip was under the other, and then they would alternate: first the Yank on top, and then Grease, then the Yank again – like that playground game where you put one fist over the other. Eventually they tired of that, and their top gunner began gesticulating at us. First he pointed at Tuesday, then he would point at his own ship. Then he would jab his fingers in a downward motion, and finally mimic a man drinking from a glass.

‘What’s he saying?’ Grease asked.

‘I think that Tuesday’s being asked out on a date, Skipper. He’s asking if we’d like a drink.’

‘That’s what I figured. Tell him yes will you?’

How do you signal yes except by putting your thumb up, and nodding your head like a demented pigeon? He didn’t seem to get it. Eventually I twinkled him. Be glad to: after you.

The reply read Me no sabby.

When I told Grease he said, ‘Fucking Indian,’ but by then he had his hands full, because the American had done a very smooth wingover and was descending in a shallow dive towards his base. England’s best, a Canadian, an Ulsterman and a Pole, tucked in behind and followed him. We sang ‘Foller Me home’ and ‘Home on the Range’, until Grease yelled at us to shut up.

I told Blackbirder at Bawne that we were slightly unsure of our right rudder, and were landing short at Thurleigh to check it out. Blackbirder believed me, and sounded concerned, but he was an officer: you’d be surprised what some of them believe. As if to make up for his exceptional take-off, Grease’s landing was an absolute boner – we bounced down Thurleigh’s main runway like a jack-in-the-box.

Their control tower came on air and said tartly, ‘Hey, Lanc, mind the real estate.’ Then, ‘Ride ’em, cowboy!’

I didn’t reply: I was too scared. Grease was holding Tuesday down like a bucking bronco, and breathing very deeply from the effort. Even with all the noise of Conroy’s kit flying about the aircraft, and my helmet on, I distinctly heard the Toff drop one of his super-farts. The last time I had heard that, a Kraut had been shooting at us.

What we didn’t want was exactly what we got – an RAF officer with as many rings as Mata Hari on the end of his sleeves was there to greet us at the foot of the tower. I expected a grade-A bollocking, but he laughed.

‘You lot still alive? Where’s my bloody walking stick then?’

The American lieutenant who had jeeped us over to sign in, asked, ‘You know this guy?’

The Toff said, ‘He’s met my foot, and Charlie’s fingers. Then we got drunk, slept in his hospital and stole his walking stick.’

‘An’ he’s still speaking to you?’

‘He’s a doc,’ said Grease, ‘we adopted him: he’s almost one of us. Especially if we give him his walking stick back. We’ll drop it over Manston on our next trip, Doc.’

The fat doctor sniffed into an enormous red handkerchief, then said, ‘I wouldn’t bother, Sergeant. I’ll be hitching a ride to Bawne with you anyway, if that’s all right. It’s my last stop, they tell me. Is it true that your last MO ran away?’

‘Was a mistake,’ Piotr told him. ‘Some focking gunner comes back in three pieces, and they make the MO sew him back together before he is buried.’

‘Why do you keep saying that it was a mistake, Pete?’ Marty asked.

‘Should have offered him money for the job. Doctors understand money.’

‘Don’t they half.’ The big MO laughed: maybe it was his big laughing day. ‘You boys thirsty?’

The crew of the B-17 we’d followed down had got there before us: a long, low, rectangular billet at the edge of the field, up close to the hedge and wire backing the Backnoe road. It was about twice as big as ours, full of off-duty airmen, and had the name ‘Snake Pit’ painted sloppily in yellow above the door. Inside it was lined with three-ply, and the roof was supported by a thin iron frame. The walls were smothered with wonderful pin-ups, and across one set of end panels they had painted the names of all the targets that the hut’s many passers through had visited. It was a word-map of France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. These boys had done the Grand Tour all right. I noticed that their stove was smaller than ours. Pete noticed it too, and was soon in animated conversation with a couple of the inmates – I guess he was cutting a deal. Grease had seen ‘Snake Pit’ and laughed aloud: one of the Yanks had asked him why, and Grease told him about the Grease Pit. ‘Home from home,’ is how Grease put it, looking around – you could always rely on him to come out with something original. I found myself with a stubby bottle of light American beer in each hand, in conversation with one of their flight engineers. I asked him why ‘Snake Pit’ and he told me that one of the radiomen was a full ‘Injun’, and kept a pet rattlesnake. In Bedfordshire.

Grease nearly stepped on it about an hour later. He was being very easy on the juice, intending to fly us back to Bawne for dinner. The snake glided from under one bed, near me, across the central aisle and under another: its movement was slow, smooth and lazy. It must have been about five feet long, and as fat as my arm at the middle. I froze. Grease stepped back and nearly stood on it. The snake ignored him. Oh yeah, that’s right, it had a big, fat, bony rattle above its tail wheel.

The engineer, Anderson, told me, ‘Don’t worry. He’s always full of rat: this place is stiff with them. That means he’s never cranky – hardly ever bites anyone. We got some serum flown in anyway, just in case.’

I suddenly felt I understood that doc who sewed Francie back together. When the fat MO started harrumphing, and looking tactfully at his watch, Grease said our thanks, and moved us on. While we were still beside the Snake Pit about six American aircrew cycled past along the Backnoe road. In among them was a smaller woman in dark blue duds, who waved, blew me a kiss and shouted, ‘Hi Charlie,’ then stood on the pedals as she pulled away to catch up the others; her dark hair stood up stiffly in the breeze.

‘My, my,’ Conners said, ‘somebody’s stock just went up.’

It had been the American woman, Emily Rea, but I didn’t tell them that: let them dream.

The MO rode up in the office, in the place I had made my own, for the short flip from Thurleigh to Bawne. I had to ride at my station, and didn’t like it. Grease fooled the Yanks with a lumpy take-off, but made a damned near perfect approach and landing at Bawne. If I had to choose, I preferred it that way. The sun came out from the clouds and kissed the runway at the same time as we did. What do the Yanks say? Geronimo!

At take-off we had queued behind two Fortresses, and the Doc explained the afternoon while we waited. ‘I bummed a ride with an American pilot named John Morgan, from Manston to here. He wouldn’t take me on to Bawne because he’s actually cleared for Twinwood, the satellite airfield just round the corner. He flies VIPs around a lot – he says he’s flown Glenn Miller.’

I’ve already told you that everyone had a Glenn Miller story in ’44: the guy had obviously been shooting a line.

‘What in?’ Grease asked.

‘Ghastly little American job: I think they call it a Norseman. Bloody rattles all the time.’

‘I know them: underpowered. So you were stuck at Thurleigh?’ Grease said.

‘Then our American friends came up with an enterprising wheeze.’

‘Tell me, sir. Although I suspect I won’t like it.’

‘Some major in the tower, waiting for his birds to come home I suspect, said they’d tune their spare into Blackbirder, wait until they heard one of ours go up on air test, and then send up a Fort to trail its coat in front of it. They said that once you spotted the B-17 you wouldn’t be able to resist bumbling over here to play the two-engine trick; once you were in that close they’d get you down for a drink, and I’d get a free lift. Taxi! They weren’t far wrong, were they?’

‘No they weren’t bloody wrong,’ Grease told him through clenched teeth: not a good loser, our skipper. We’d got an MO again, and a pretty senior one at that. Although I’m not sure that we were going to like it. The next morning he paraded me, Grease and the Toff in his office for medicals. He got reacquainted with the damaged bits, and grinned at me afterwards.

‘I didn’t do a bad job, did I? I was worried about your fingers at the time.’

‘You might have told me, sir!’

‘I’m too good a doctor for that.’

Maybe he’d be worth hanging on to after all.