So it was our turn. We were going to Merseburg. I didn’t like the colour Pete’s face turned when the curtain was pulled back and he saw the map. Grease usually shifted around in his chair during a briefing because it was too small for him. This time he sat still. Like he was dead, I suddenly thought, and a nerve twitched under my left eyelid. Then I thought, Fuck it! and started to pay attention. The only thing I liked about the target was the predicted weather – we were supposed to have layers of cloud to duck in and out of all of the way back, but enough clear over the target to clobber it. They told us it was some military shit or other, but I had begun to believe that they made that up. We were just bombing German people in their homes until the Kraut soldiers at the front had had enough, and went home. The senior intelligence officer at the briefing – he was the one with the Mexican handlebars – always told us about the cumulative effect our bombing campaign was having on the morale of the civilian population. I remember cornering him at a party at Lavenham, and pointing out that as far as I knew the more bombs the Jerry dropped on Liverpool, the angrier and more determined our civilians there had become. He said, ‘There you have it, old man. That’s why we’re going to win the war. We can take it, but the Jerry can’t. Every day Butch tells Winston that their morale’s crumbling and the end is just around the corner: LMF, the lot of them.’
Yeah. That would be right! So why the hell were they still shooting back at us? For the whole of the briefing Piotr viewed the stage with left eye only, through a circle he made with the first finger and thumb of his left hand. As we shuffled out I asked him why.
‘To ward off the evil eye: old Polish trick. Some other bugger get flames out his arse tonight.’
‘You don’t believe in the evil eye, Pete. That’s an old wives’ tale.’
‘Lots of old wives in Merseburg. Merseburg is a witchcraft city.’
‘Don’t talk wet.’
Quelch was behind us in the press. That wasn’t always where you were comfortable with him placed. He said, ‘He’s right you know. Forget the gibbery guff about marshalling yards and tank turret factories: all Merseburg has got going for it is a hell of a lot of witches. Always did have.’
‘See!’ said Pete.
‘Don’t bloody encourage him,’ I told Quelch, ‘he’s windy enough already.’
‘And you ain’t? Piss my blankets!’
If you’ve never been to Merseburg, don’t: not even in peacetime. It had little to recommend it even before we and the Americans started to do it over, and has even less now. Pete was right. It had a lot of radar-predicted flak – heavy guns. As usual we were about a third of the way back along the stream, which was Grease’s favourite place: Squelch was thirty yards behind us, which was his. Even from twenty miles away when we broke from the embrace of the cloud, we could see accurate flak converting Lancasters instantaneously to flame above the target. Merseburg itself boiled with flame, like a wild cauldron, and as we flew into it the smell of burning even got through our masks. It had been burning for a week already I’d guess. What else was there left to bomb? How could anyone still be alive in that? We bombed on red target indicators that winked up at us.
Grease was steadily whispering, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck – fuck.’ His consistency was reassuring somehow, and it was good to know that he’d figured out some way to count off the seconds.
Marty was very good; very calm; like an angelus tolling. ‘Up, up . . . left; left again.’
‘Get on with it, Marty’ – that was Fergal.
‘Steady . . . steady . . .’ Then he used the words of power, and Tuesday leapt up and forward, for freedom.
Only one bad thing happened. A Lanc that was below us must have dropped its load and simultaneously hit an updraft, and I reckon it rose clear through 1,000 feet. Marty saw it coming, and Grease had to weave to make room for it, which spoiled our aiming-point picture. I was in the dome looking upwards, when suddenly this Lanc lifted alongside into my field of vision like magic. Grease was cursing it, but I guess that its pilot had been caught by surprise as well. I saw him look across at me in the red glow, and distinctly saw his teeth bared in a grin. He was a pro all right, because he immediately put his ship’s nose down and dived away from us, gaining speed. He must have been a hundred feet ahead and another hundred lower when a flak shell burst directly in front of him. With a smoothness of motion which belied what must have been happening inside, all four of its engines stopped, it turned over on its back, and in that configuration swan-dived gracefully into the hungry red sea beneath us. There was a flash of yellow as it struck, as if Merseburg had swallowed it, and belched.
Marty reported calmly, ‘No parachutes.’
‘Thank you; got that,’ Conroy said.
When its pilot had turned and grinned at me I could see that the Lanc had had pictures on its nose, the same as Tuesday. But it wasn’t the same as Tuesday, of course: I couldn’t read the name, but I saw it’s cartoon clearly because it was large and outlined in white: a wickedly grimacing witch on a broomstick. I decided not to mention that at the interrogation.
Grease did an odd thing on the way back. Conners had routed us back to the coast avoiding the hot spots for flak, but instead of staying down on the cloud, or close to it, Grease climbed and climbed, up in the clear, cold air. You could see the stars for a million miles. Grease clicked. ‘Sorry about this chaps, you’ll be late for breakfast, but I just didn’t feel safe down there tonight.’
I don’t know what the others thought, but that was all right by me.
I heard a conversation between Grease and Fergal that went something like: ‘Fergal?’
‘Skipper?’
‘What was our rate of climb?’
‘Fucking amazing, Skip. Either we left half the kite back there, or we have four very enthusiastic motors.’
‘That’s what I thought, too. Fuel consumption?’
‘Bang on. You might even have some to spare.’
‘Curious. I wonder what Chiefy did to the old witch.’
I wished he hadn’t said that.
Conners said, ‘Navigator, Skip. Dutch coast in three minutes.’
‘Thanks Nav; course?’
‘Second star from the right, and straight on till morning.’
‘Arsehole.’
Some time later Marty, crouching behind the front turret guns, reported a fading, red glow in the cloud a couple of miles below us: somebody had bought it. Grease’s shoulders slumped and he dived for the coast and the open sea, gaining speed as the clocks unwound. When we had no further essential use for our masks he began to whistle. It was the old march tune ‘Lillibolero’.
In the Morris driving back from dispersal, I sat in the front next to Fiver because she asked me to. She held my hand between smooth gear changes: we didn’t talk; I was bone-tired, but very alert. I heard Grease say, ‘That was meant to be us. Some other poor sods got burned for us tonight.’
‘Some other poor sods didn’t have no skipper half as clever as ours,’ said Piotr, and I heard the rasp of a struck match as he lit his fag.
We got the IO with the Mexican handlebars because Harriet hadn’t returned yet: I asked myself if she ever would. The Boss moved restlessly from table to table, crew to crew, during the interrogation. We were one short; an all-officer crew that had ditched their Lanc in the Wash. It was our B-Flight commander. Air-sea rescue had located their dinghy and remarkably all seven of them were recovered, but I suppose you can’t get lucky all the time. The flight commander tended to leave us as alone as much as we did him: I couldn’t remember having seen him for a couple of weeks, except at squadron briefings. Fergal explained that officers always floated – drowning wasn’t a good way of getting rid of them.
The IO had to put up with this conversation and frowned a lot. Bushless was touching his lip from time to time, where his moustache had been. He seemed to listen to the debrief with interest, particularly when we described the Lanc we saw lost in front of us over target, and he told Grease, ‘That would have been Porterman. He’s not back yet.’
According to Chiefy Bryan, Porterman’s crew had been lost the week before. The IO caught my eye and shook his head briefly; better not to say anything.
The Boss was back by the door as we filed out, with a word for every crew. Seeing him touch his lip again I found a tired smile from somewhere and asked him, ‘Miss it, Boss?’
He grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me out of line. ‘No. But it makes me look too bloody young – I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a sprog like you, Bassett.’
‘No, sir.’
Grease turned and gave me a sharp questioning glance, looking over his shoulder. I was embarrassed. I didn’t need an officer’s personal bloody revelations.
‘It’s probably the novelty. I’d leave it off, if I was you, sir,’ I said.
‘Y-e-s,’ he said, pronouncing the word slowly, as if some thought was required, then something strange happened behind his eyes and he said, ‘Porterman’s crew is overdue.’ His tic flickered alarmingly.
Instead of reminding him that Porterman was dead, I said, ‘Yes Boss.’ Was I turning into Peter Wynn: twenty years old from the neck down, and a million years old above it.
Piotr was waiting for me at the door, and like Grease had been listening to every word. I’ve told you that sometimes you hit the bed weary to your very bones, and that was that. Well, that morning we lay there for a long time before anyone snored.
When I staggered out of my pit in the morning Grease was already outside. I asked him what the Thurleigh visit had been about. Grease’s egg and bacon plan had been the two-engined trick to get Tuesday invited to Thurleigh, and once on the deck do some illegal exchanges. Once he had a beer in his hand he forgot. I told him, ‘I have a contact there. Why don’t you leave it to me?’
‘OK.’
‘Did you notice the snake?’
‘What snake?’
‘Forget it.’
Grease said something else, but I didn’t catch it because my head was in the bucket.
When I lifted it out Grease was a hundred yards away already, stretching out into the long, loping strides that seemed able to carry him on forever. I went in to shave, and then sneaked out to phone Grace, using the post bike to glide down into Bawne.
‘Hi. It’s me.’
‘I know, Barnes told me. I was dressed this time, so he didn’t get a treat.’
‘Apologize for me.’ Grace giggled. It was good between us. ‘I miss you.’
‘I know. It’s wretched, isn’t it? Can you come over, or meet me somewhere?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll call you later if I can.’
‘That’s good. If you’re not flying on Thursday night we could go back to the ARC at Bedford.’
‘You told me that it wasn’t fun there any more.’
‘It isn’t, but there’s a pianist playing there I want to hear. A blind man from the East End; he plays his own sort of jazz but it’s not like jazz you’ve ever heard: it’s softer, smoother – Grease would say that it’s cool. It’s the sort of music they would need to play to calm me down if I was stuck in a lift. That’s one of my big fears by the way; I don’t think I told you that before.’
‘You didn’t, and I’ll remember.’
‘I know you will, Charlie. By the way, Daddy’s back, but he looks tired.’
‘Tell him I repaired his radio.’
‘He already knows; he was up there for hours last night listening to you – I think Barnsey was sitting with him: they both looked hungover this morning.’
It was a difficult conversation to end: the telephone did it for me as the money ran out.
I remembered overhearing an odd conversation that Fergal and Grease had had about Tuesday’s engines the night before, and mindful of the fact that the others would not have surfaced yet, and being nosey, I cycled back to dispersal to ask the ground crew. Maybe I could bum a bacon sarnie out of them as a bonus. Grease had beaten me to it, of course. He was there in his running outfit, gently steaming in the cool air. He stuck his head back into the old railway wagon as I slithered to a halt alongside him.
‘Make that two sarnies if you can spare them – we’ll swap you half a bottle of brandy if you like – Charlie’s just turned up. We all owe him a thank you anyway.’
I didn’t rise to it.’
‘What did they do to her while we were away?’ I asked him.
‘Gave her an extra ten knots maybe, and she climbs like an eagle.’
‘How come?’
‘Why don’t you ask the Chief yourself, he’s up inside working on the Toff’s turret. Did you know that it jammed on him last night?’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Me neither. The sniffy little bastard didn’t tell anyone.’
I always liked the way Tuesday shifted slightly as you climbed on board and moved around her. It was as if she was alive. I had two sandwiches, bacon grilled on their coke brazier between tombstone-size slabs of bread: one for me, and one for the Chief. He nodded as I handed his up to him, and said, ‘Mind me tool box.’
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked him.
‘I think a bearing’s collapsed. I haven’t seen that on one of these new turret rings before. Could be that bloody grease which did for the doors.’
‘Can you fix it?’
‘No problem. But it’ll take us a couple of hours. She’ll be ready for tonight.’
It was often like that. They knew before us if there was an op on: it wouldn’t have surprised me if he knew the target as well. I never did get round to asking him what they had done to boost Tuesday’s motors.