According to our logbooks the next trip was to Celle, northeast of Hanover. There was probably a garden gnome factory, vital to the Hun war effort, that needed a bit of a seeing to. We put 350 Lancs and fifty Hallibags over Celle in twenty minutes, and turned a vertical example of Man’s achievement into a horizontal one. As part of the deal we started a number of random fires as well. The year was drawing in, and Butch probably wanted to save the beleaguered citizenry fuel. I can’t say much about the trip because there is damn all about it in our logbooks.
One of the reasons that there’s damn all in our logbooks is because we didn’t see another aircraft from the time we took off until we were back in the circuit around Bawne. Not even Q. The vis that night was absolutely awful: it was like flying through diarrhoea, so I was on listening watch for most of the outward trip.
After debriefing we trooped back into the Pit to find that Grace had roared up the stove. She was sitting on Pete’s bed in uniform issue silks two sizes too big for her, hugging her knees. The smell of bacon was hanging in the air.
We weren’t flying for a couple of days: Butcher’s orders. The squadron must have done something to please the old sod for once. Of course, it wasn’t us that they were worried about, it was the aircraft. All of A Flight’s and most of B Flight’s crates were due about ten hours’ work: engine-out jobs in some cases. They could still poke us into spare kites, but Samson must have gone down the easier route.
By now some of the new guys were pointing us out in the sergeants’ mess and whispering the number of trips we’d done. They tended to come up and make conversation, as if our longevity could rub off on them: it rarely did. By October ’44 the squadron average aircrew life was eight trips a piece before you copped it. Oddly enough for the actual aircraft themselves it was nine: I’ve never got my head around those stats. Anyway, it meant that you were reluctant to get close to anyone off the crew. Quelch and his gang were the exceptions; they’d attached themselves to us, and there was nothing we could do about that. For us the good side of it was that, for two reasons, the bosses tended to be just that wee bit more economical with the experienced crews: firstly the experience itself was valuable, expensive and hard earned – why throw it away? – and secondly the impact on squadron morale was worse when a crew close to screening got the chop. To use Grease’s cricketing metaphor, getting the chop was a bit like coming to the top of the batting order as the blokes in front of you got out. Whereas, if a tyro crew copped it in the first couple of ops, so what? That’s what everyone expected anyway.
We were third top in the squadron’s batting order: there were two crews with more trips against them than us. One was an all-officer crew who’d got through twenty-five trips without leaving a mark on their aircraft. It creaked a bit, but looked as good as the day it left the factory. They were all upper-class tools: we all knew they’d never make it. The other crew was a mixed mob, both by rank and nationality: they had had so many prangs that nobody knew how they’d got to twenty-seven. They were drunk nearly all the time now, and I had the feeling that they might just complete their tour and get clear. If we were behind them at take-off Grease always used to let them get airborne before launching Tuesday after them. The way he put it was that he had no intention of Tuesday falling into the damn great hole in the ground they were going to make one day: I reckoned he was wrong.
I suppose some questions were asked about why we had an ATA girl in tow so frequently, although none got back to us. Everyone knew that she was one of us, but no one outside the crew knew by how much. Grease worked out that the best we could do was never appear anywhere on the station as a complete crew: that way, with a bit of luck, no one would work out that we’d cast off a Polish rear gunner in favour of an English lady pilot.
Have you ever had a late autumn’s day off, when it failed to rain, and the sun gave the last of its life to the ploughed fields? I have. Grace and I took the bicycles down the Drift, and walked out to an old oak tree that reared from a grassy hump in the middle of a field. She lay with her head on my shoulder as we soaked up the air’s last heat. I opened my battledress jacket, and she her uniform jacket.
‘This is heavenly,’ she said.
‘What is?’
‘Being with you. Sun shining. Feeling good with all of you. Peace.’
‘In Tuesday, what we do, Precious, isn’t peace.’
‘It is for me. Nobody’s called me Precious before – do you mean it?’
I could have said ‘indubitably’, I suppose, but I didn’t. I thought about the question as if it had meant something, and said, ‘Yes. I do. Very much. I’m scared to death when you’re in the back of Tuesday.’
‘So am I. But it is much better than when I waited in the hut for you all to come back. Are you scared for yourself as well?’
‘Of course I am, and for Grease and each of the others. But it’s something we don’t talk about. If one of us said “Let’s go home” when we were halfway to Lubeck one night, there’s a fair chance that the rest would agree – so we don’t talk about it. I won’t let them down if they won’t let me down. It’s something like that.’
‘Not long now,’ Grace said.
‘No, not long now,’ and I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face.
I think that it was about 5 minutes later that Grace suddenly sat up and said, ‘I nearly forgot; I’ve brought you a present.’ She opened her gas-mask case and produced a lumpy parcel. It was inexpertly wrapped in brown paper and tarred string, as if a child had done it. I wasn’t used to gifts. They weren’t my family’s thing. Inside the paper and string there was an unused straight briar pipe, three large tins of RN issue Light Navy Cut tobacco, and a couple of boxes of matches. Her voice told me just how much she wanted me to be pleased; I didn’t disappoint her. She said, ‘You talked about starting a pipe; I hope the tobacco’s all right. Daddy got it for me from a friend in the service.’
‘It will be wonderful. No one’s given me anything like this before. Where on earth did you find the pipe?’
‘I went up to London to get it. There’s a wonderful shop on the Strand – you should smell the tobacco and cigars in there: only you need a ration for them. The pipe shape is called a straight billiard. I didn’t know what to get as a starter.’
I gave her a kiss that went on for hours, but stopped at the lips.
‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ she asked me.
‘Yes.’
‘What? Tell me.’
‘I love the pipe you brought me.’
She squealed, and pushed me off. ‘Bastard. You know what I wanted you to say!’
‘I love you?’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’ I said.
‘Good,’ she said, as if something had been settled, and smiled an odd inwardly directed smile.
Later she asked me, ‘When your tour’s over the crew splits up, doesn’t it?’
‘Most likely: unless we volunteer for the Pathfinders or special duties as a complete crew. Even then there’d be no guarantee that we’d stay together, so I’m sure that we won’t be doing that. We’ll go our separate ways – mostly as trainers to operational training units.’
‘I’ve delivered more clapped-out aircraft to OTUs than you’ve had bad breakfasts.’
‘Sorry. Why did you ask?’
‘So I can explain something.’ It was the first time I’d heard her wander around a subject until she found a decent glide path. I meant to ask her about that sometime.
‘Explain away, then. I’m going to sit up and fill my first pipe.’ We disentangled.
‘I’m in love with you, Charlie, and I want to make love with you. A lot. I think about it often; especially when you’re not around.’
‘That’s not a problem.’ I had difficulty with the pipe.
‘I’ve seen Daddy do it,’ Grace said. ‘The art is rub the tobacco between your palms until it’s shredded, and then pack the pipe neither too hard or too lightly.’ Then she said, ‘I don’t want to sleep with anyone else any more.’
‘That’s not a problem either.’ I had the pipe about right, I thought, and managed to light it from the first match, with my hand cupped around the pipe bowl. It felt wonderfully natural.
‘You’re such a mule, sometimes, Charlie. Don’t you see that it wouldn’t be fair on the others if I suddenly say to them Charlie’s my man: he gets me from now on, and you lot don’t. How will they feel?’
‘So you’re going to carry on shagging the lot?’
‘Don’t be so stupid. What I’m saying is that I’m going to do it with no one; not even you.’
‘Not even me?’
‘That’s right: no exceptions. I’m part of the crew now. You don’t have sex with the rear gunner.’
‘Never?’ I had the pipe going well now; the tobacco tasted warm and sweet in my mouth.
‘Not until the end of the tour. Then as much as you like, for as long as you like. Just you. Can you wait that long?’
‘Yes.’ I let a great sweet cloud of blue smoke into the air. I think I grinned at her.
‘If I have to.’ Then I let the silence hang, before asking, ‘Will you marry me?’
Grace’s mouth dropped open. She laughed a scared laugh. I persisted.
‘After the war: will you marry me?’
She made me wait. The laughter dried up. Eventually she gave me the eye-to-eye and said, ‘If you can find me. Yes.’
On the way back we stopped at the end of the Drift, and were buzzed by a strange grey and green Spitfire with American stars where its red, white and blue should have been. I leaned the clumsy post bike I was riding over to touch hers, and kissed her again. Why do your lips feel so heavy and sensitive when the sap’s rising? She laughed with pure pleasure. She made me believe that someone cared for me.
Marty was on his own in the Pit with one of our well-abused Olympia Press books – The Nun’s Tale – and I asked him where the others were.
‘Some Yank Spitfire – I didn’t know they had any – turned up ten minutes ago, and Grease’s nose bothered him.’
Five minutes later Grease came in with a small box tucked under one arm. He tossed it to me; it was heavier than it looked.
‘That’s from your pal Peter Wynn, but you’ll not get near him: the officers have got him. Like flies around a turd. He asked me to give you the box; it was his excuse for coming over. He says that Quelch has bought it from some bloke called Tommo.’
Grace said, ‘I think I’ll just go over and say hello,’ and left us.
‘I wonder what the Quelch is up to?’ Toff said.
I turned over the box, reading its legends. The contents were the property of the United States Eighth Army Air Force. There were a lot serial numbers and a description.
‘What’s he got now?’ said Grease.
‘An illuminating deflection gunsight for a fighter plane,’ I told him.
‘What for?’
‘It’s Quelch. Who knows?’
Something was eating at Grease, and he wasn’t ready to tell us yet. I hoped that it was nothing to do with Grace.
I received a letter. It was on the letter board in the mess, secured beneath pink criss-crossed elastic that had been designed for knickers. On the back of the pale blue envelope a small neat hand read From Jane Shore. It was delicately perfumed.
Quelch was there first. He said, as I reached for it, ‘Mistress Shore, no less. Wasn’t she the whore of one of the Edwards? The Third or the Fourth? In our case, the late lamented Abbot’s beautiful lady. If you’re doing what I think you’re doing young Charles, it’s close to necrophilia. Following in the cock steps of a dead man.’
A couple of the big, younger sergeants were hanging around: they sniggered. When I gave them the stare they looked away quickly, and when Q screwed up his mouth with a kiss for them, they shuffled off.
I grinned at Quelch. ‘That was good. Two months ago they would have mouthed off at me.’
‘It’s your twenty-odd trips. They look at you, and remember not to speak ill of the dead.’
‘Is that how they see me? Already dead?’
‘Of course. Isn’t that how you see yourself?’
‘No. It’s what I see when I look at them.’
‘You are not our typical aviator, Charles. Dead men walking; all of us.’
The girl’s name and the perfume were a cover, of course. It was from Pete: addressed to me, but meant for the whole crew. Reading between the lines he said that he was well, and that we were to use all the spare things we were minding for him: he didn’t think he’d be back. I read it standing on the roadway. Quelch stood in front of me, and didn’t try to get a look at it. It was the sort of thing you liked him for. He had the wooden box in his hand: I had put it in the top space of his locker, which he never locked.
‘Good news, was it?’ he asked.
‘Very,’ I said, ‘she’s a trooper; a good sort.’
He gave me a push, suddenly acting like a pantomime dame. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you are a one.’
We shared the road until it split: him to the main gate; me to the peri-track and the Pit. When I asked him what he was going to do with the gunsight, he became serious, and gave me a peculiarly sensible explanation: ‘Shoot at the Kraut, of course.’
‘Explain.’
‘Pluke’ – he was Quelch’s bomb aimer – ‘is a bloody useless front gunner.’ I nodded: we all knew that. ‘So we’ve locked the front turret gun barrels exactly parallel to the forward fuselage: they can’t elevate, depress or traverse. All they can do is point forward. So instead of him doing all of those nervy things, and missing every time, I just point Mother at the Kraut, fly up his arse, lay a bit off for deflection if he’s crossing me, and tell Plukey to press the tit. Bingo: Kraut in a state of advanced combustion. The point is, we aim the kite, not the guns. The Kraut isn’t used to hulking great Lancs chasing him around the forests of Bavaria with machine guns: quite a shock to his old system, I’d guess.’
‘And the gunsight?’
‘If my chiefy can get it mounted and working, it will mean I can get the job done with less bullets: shorter bursts.’
‘Have you told the Boss, or the master gunner?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think that I’m glad I don’t fly with you.’
‘Another two or three of Mac’s touchdowns and you could change your mind.’
‘Yeah,’ I told him, ‘he can get kinda lumpy, can’t he?’
I didn’t tell everyone about the letter at first. Just Grease. I waited until the Pit was empty before I showed him. Grace hadn’t come back. Grease got in first, before I had a chance. He looked shifty.
‘Grace had a word with me,’ he said.
‘Uh huh . . .’
‘While she’s in the turret she doesn’t want any of us in her turret . . . if you see what I mean.’
‘You mean . . .?’
‘Yep. She says she can’t be one of the team unless she stops screwing the team. She said that you’d understand, but the others might not. What do you think?’
‘I think that Grace is keeping us together and alive. For that reason, if she told us to go to church parade in girls’ dresses every Sunday, and whistle in the communion cup, we’d do it. I think that the others will see it her way as well. I think that you’ll explain that to them and that I’ll back you up, although you won’t need me to.’
‘Thanks, Charlie.’ He still looked uncomfortable.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘I just notice the way you look at Grace sometimes. She might even look back at you the same way. Have you gone soft on her?’
‘Maybe a bit softer than you have, Grease. Will that do?’
‘And you’ll still not . . .?’
‘Not until the tour’s over, Skip. Then it’s every man for himself.’
He put his arm around my shoulder. ‘You’re a good man Charlie Bassett.’ I wished that folk wouldn’t keep saying that.
I handed him Pete’s letter. Grease read it twice. Don’t get me wrong, he was a great skipper, but academically not the sharpest arrow in the quiver.
‘Should we have a look at what he’s left here, or wait for the others?’ he asked.
‘You tell me; you’re the skipper.’
That was unfair of me, because on most other occasions outside the aircraft I was at pains to point out to him that he held exactly the same rank as the rest of us. He gave me a strained look that said as much.
‘Let’s do it.’
There were three shiny black metal cabin trunks under Pete’s bed, padlocked, and three upright battered personal lockers filched from the flying rooms. I suspected that the six keys on a key ring I had found on my bedside locker after Pete had pissed off would provide an easy answer. There was another thing I found. I found that my .45 and the box of bullets were missing again. We lifted the boxes on to Pete’s bed. One was already jemmied by Pete’s late visitor. It contained a three-inch layer of papers – mostly signed-off bills in Polish. Underneath that it was packed with booze; nearly forty bottles of spirits of all types and strengths. I wondered where the vodka had come from, and promised myself a taste. The second box contained cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco. I was disappointed to find no pipe tobacco. The truth is that although Pete had kept us supplied, we had kept our noses out of his affairs. That meant that neither Grease nor I had ever seen as much loot together in one place. There was enough here to fling a couple of decent parties, keep us in smoke until the end of our tour, and then some, and some left over to flog. I remembered that Pete always used the word ‘convert’ – he never thought of himself as a salesman.
Grease suddenly turned away from the last of the boxes with a grunt; I asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Don’t know, Charlie. Let’s look at the lockers: I’m trying to work out what we can safely keep, and how much of this stuff we’ve got to get rid of.’
The lockers were much the same. Crammed in alongside Pete’s uniforms – including that of a Czech army corporal, a ruse de guerre previously unknown to us – were innumerable bottles of whisky, boxes of butter and cheese, cartons of cigarettes and small motor parts. There were also neatly folded squares of parachute silk. Whatever Pete had been up to, he’d got too good at.
We were still unloading them when the Toff, Marty and Conners blew in. They had this word we all used at that time. Toff used it. ‘Strewth!’
Years later, after he had become intelligent, he explained to me that he thought it had derived from the medieval middle English, and meant ‘God’s death’. It wasn’t God who had died for this stuff, but two nosey coppers who weren’t quick enough on the draw. We sat on the beds around our mountain of what was undoubtedly ill-gotten gain.
‘What’s in the other box?’ Marty asked.
I watched Grease, who watched me. Finally he nodded to me, and I stood up to open it. It was full of money.
It was Grace who put it all into context later when she came back a bit squiffy from officer camp. ‘No matter what you think, the money’s not as dangerous as all these bills and letters,’ she said.
We were counting the money: bundles of notes in elastic bands. I think we had more there than you’d find in the bank at St Neots after the Saturday market. We had counted about a tenth of it before we gave up, and got to nearly £1,000. It was like looking at ten good pools wins, I thought.
Grace was leafing through the papers bundled on top of the spirits in the first box we’d opened. ‘I can’t read Polish, but I know an invoice when I see one – that was the end of the business Daddy started in.’
‘So?’ I was the only one paying any attention.
‘If Pete was some sort of one-man Mafia, which I can’t believe by the way, it looks like he kept reasonably meticulous records of his ill deeds. There are dates on these bills going back to 1941 . . .’
‘When he arrived here. He got in through Spain.’
‘. . . and names that I recognize. I reckon you’ve got half the exiled Polish government, assorted English dukes and countesses, not to mention MPs, generals, colonels, group captains, wing commanders and dozens of others. It looks like he was once an aide-de-camp for some Polish general. Since then Pete has been feeding the black market with goods obtained by crooked Polish functionaries: he was like an agent or a go-between. And he took a cut, probably both ways. All of his customers could be here.’
When you’re twenty, and looking at the biggest heap of money you’re ever likely to see in your life, the implications sometimes escape you. Not so Conners.
‘Pete was mad to keep records.’
‘Or maybe wiser than you think,’ said Grace, ‘because if any of those persons know that they exist they’d shift heaven and earth to get them back.’
Grease gave a great sigh: I think that all along he’d known it was too good to be true.
‘I think we’d better talk about this,’ he told us.
Marty and Conners made us real coffee: there was plenty of that too. What Grease did next was lead off the discussion by asking me, ‘Are you sure that Pete wants us to have all this?’
‘That’s what the letter says. I was happy with that before I saw the money, but now I’m not so sure.’
After that he sat back, and let everyone have their say. Then he asked questions and summarized what was coming out of the sausage machine at the business end. It finished like this: ‘We’ve about nine or ten trips left, and we could knock them off in a month, or get knocked off doing them.’
We nodded. This was the skipper.
‘And we’ve more booze, fags and money than we need to get us through.’
Not one of us dissented.
‘And what’s more the whole lot is likely to be, if not hot, at least decidedly warm, and recognizable when the cops come back looking for it.’
That was the bit we didn’t like. I answered for all of us.
‘Yeah.’
‘So first, we split the booze and fags from the dosh. Nobody gets to know about the dosh except us.’
‘OK,’ said Marty: he had perked up a bit. We were all extremely depressed about our good fortune; it must be the way it takes you.
‘The only risk we take is getting someone already into the black market to take everything else off our hands.’
I said, ‘I already know someone. That Yank Tommo who sold a gunsight to Quelch. He’s a big black cheese at Thurleigh: you want it, he’s got it. That sort of guy. I met some navigators who said that he was a gangster or something. They were really leery of him.’
‘Coloured bloke, is he then?’ Grease asked.
‘No. Black as in black market, as in Al Capone.’
‘Oh! Do you know him well, Charlie?’
‘No; only a bit. Just a couple of deals. But Major Wynn obviously trusts him: better we trust him than a complete stranger.’ The only two people who knew about the .45 were me and Piotr: I decided to keep it that way. ‘What do you want me to ask him?’
Grace had a head for business. ‘Ask him to take everything off your hands. Everything. Replace it with enough to get us through the month, and give us the rest in money, less his cut. Don’t argue over the pennies.’
‘And you’ve got until 1300 tomorrow to get it done,’ the Toff told me.
‘Why?’
‘Because they could be marching us in for a briefing to God knows where soon after that.’
For the life of me I can’t remember the name of the pub in Thurleigh. It’s called the Jackal now, but I’m sure it was different then. There’s something going wrong with a man who can’t remember the names of the pubs he’s drunk in. It was late evening. There was a quiet group of USAAF men up at the bar. Something must have happened, although Tommo said that all the ships had come back that afternoon.
He hung up the conversation for a beat of about five before saying, ‘We can sit here all evening making small talk, but you ain’t got the time, an’ I ain’t got the time, so why don’t you spit out what you drove over here to tell me?’
So I did. The whole story. It was a two-pint tale: we bought a round each. Afterwards he stared out the window for several minutes before replying.
‘Normally I don’t do real business with folks I don’t know real well.’
I nodded; it was better to let him talk it out.
‘That business we done was just favours for friends, and getting to know your price, you know?’
Nod again, Charlie.
‘You could be a pig for all I know.’
‘I told you: we’ve just dumped two of those in the North Sea. I can show you their pistols: in fact, we’d need you to get rid of those too, if you can. Pete left them.’
‘Big Russian jobs? I can unload them in London no problem. Officers will soon be looking for souvenirs to take home to mummy and daddy.’
‘I’m not a policeman Tommo; and I’m not working with them. I’ve got a couple of hundredweight of black market goods that I didn’t ask for, and I’m scared to death a copper’s going to walk through the door any minute. I didn’t know who else’s advice to get.’
He nodded this time. ‘An’ the deal is, I take your stuff into my stock, an’ it disappears. I give you enough of my stuff to get your team through to the end of your tour, and give you the difference in dough? About how much was you thinking about?’
‘Haven’t a clue, Tommo. I don’t know the going rates. You give me what it’s worth: less your commission – you set that too. We can’t do this without you. Want another pint?’
‘I want my head examining.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Where you got the stuff?’
‘In the car around the corner. It’s all in there – packed full.’
‘Aw Christ, Charlie! You got a death wish? I knew there was someone doing it on your station. There’s someone like me at most camps. I just hadn’t got round to meeting him yet – it’s a sort of floating network; you plug into someone when you need them.’
‘Pete would have agreed with that.’
‘When Major Wynn sent me over with the radio spares you wanted, I figured it must be you; that was until I met you. Then I knew you hadn’t got the savvy.’
‘Thanks for that, Tommo.’
‘No offence intended, pal.’
‘None taken.’
‘What happened to the dough?’
‘The dough?’
‘The money?’
‘Yes, I know what it means. What money?’
‘Your pal’s working capital. He took off and left you with his business – he will have taken all the money he could use, but that still left his working capital.’
‘Yeah. I see. He did leave some cash behind. We haven’t made up our minds what to do with it yet.’
‘How much?’
‘About £2,000.’ Oh, Charlie.
‘Don’t flash it around fer Chrissake, OK? Don’t draw attention to yourselves.’
‘OK. I’ll tell them.’
‘I’ll wash it for you, if you like. Say for 5 per cent.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll give you US dollars for it, less my 5 per cent. That’s a handling fee. Then I take you up to my good pal the captain who runs the cash accounts at PX store – he’s a trained accountant, you know – tell him you won it in a crap game, and he exchanges it for nice clean British money.’
‘Less his 5 per cent, of course.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’ll tell them. Thanks for the offer.’
‘When you start smoking that pipe?’
‘Yesterday. My girlfriend gave it me.’
‘Maybe I’ll start. You can’t get a decent cigar in this country any more.’
‘I know; the Yanks have got them all.’
He paused before he laughed at that.
I drove back carefully, sitting on £475 15s in my back pocket. Tommo said he’d send over English cigarettes and whisky in a day. The laugh was that by the time I got back, the Pit had run out of cigarettes, so they had to beg a packet from another crew.