The Crew (23 page)

‘Well, I guess that's what they're going to have to do now, anyway.'

She nodded. ‘When I heard Peter was missing, I'm ashamed to say I was almost glad. That's a dreadful confession, I know. But I've been so convinced that he'd make Catherine unhappy – was
already
making her unhappy – and that was something I couldn't bear. And then you came along . . . like the answer to my prayers. So different. So right for her.' She touched his arm. ‘I'm so sorry, Van. I shouldn't have said any of this to you. Please forget I ever did. Let's go back inside. Catherine will be wondering why we're taking so long.'

They turned back towards the house, and when they were half-way across the lawn, Catherine came running out. From the look on her face he knew exactly what had happened.

‘Peter's mother 'phoned. They've just heard – he's a prisoner-of-war with the Germans. Thank God! He's
alive.
'

PART III

Eleven

HARRY STOOD IN
the cold drizzle, waiting with nearly a hundred other men for the trucks to take them out to dispersal. They were dressed in heavy flying clothes, wearing life jackets and parachute harnesses with the rest of their clobber strewn around their feet – parachute packs, navigation bags, ration boxes – so that the place looked a bit like a refugee camp. Sam was tucked inside Harry's battledress jacket under his Mae West, safe out of the wet, the carrier pigeon snug in its box. He wished he was so lucky.

Their seventeenth op, and he still got the jim-jams every time. He was OK for most of the day until after the briefing and the flying supper. It always started in the locker room while he was getting togged up, and got worse with every stage: the hanging around for transport, the ride out to dispersal, the final look round before he climbed the ladder . . . all the time hoping up till the very last minute that they'd scrub it. Once he got down to the job, it wasn't so bad – mainly because there wasn't much time to think about anything else. He was all right until they were approaching the target when the jim-jams got going again and stayed with him until they'd dropped the bombs and were safely away. He didn't know how it was with the others, but that was the way it always was with him. He groped in his top pocket for his pipe;
he wouldn't smoke it but it gave him a bit of comfort just to clench it in his teeth.

All the other blokes standing around looked so calm, when he was bloody sure they weren't inside. The jawing and joking going on was to cover up what they were really feeling underneath – bloody scared, like him. But what they were all saying to themselves, same as him, was that it wouldn't happen to
them.
It'd be the other bloke who bought it. Always the other bloke.

Stew came over for a match – as usual his lighter had gone u/s. His Irvin jacket collar was turned up round his ears and under it he wore a heavy wool sweater up to his chin; thick white seamen's socks showed above his flying boots. His face was wet with rain, the cigarette in his mouth soggy.

‘Sodding weather! If they cut the barrage balloon cables, the whole bloody country'd sink. Jesus, I don't know why I ever came here.'

Harry sucked at his empty pipe. ‘To show us you could stand the right way up.'

‘Yeah . . . that was it.'

It took three matches to get Stew's cigarette alight. Unlucky, that, Harry thought uneasily.

The lorries were arriving, the crews starting to collect up their gear and make their way over towards them. He picked up his 'chute pack and the pigeon's box. His stomach felt like a cement-mixer as he waited his turn to clamber up into the back of a lorry, giving Charlie a hand-up ahead of him, passing up his stuff. Not much chance of a scrub now.

Tubby Green's crew were in there and it was their last op. They were swapping a few jokes about it and what they'd do when it was over, but he could tell they
were afraid of tempting fate. He caught the eye of their wireless op and gave him a nod and a thumbs-up. If all went well they'd be finished and done in a few hours. Lucky devils.

He looked further down the bench to where Charlie was sitting, twice his real size in his padded suit. The lad had got a bad cold and shouldn't really be flying. He'd tried to talk him into seeing the MO for a chit, but he wouldn't hear of being left behind. He ought to have got the skipper to stop him. He'd promised Dorothy he'd look after him, and a fat lot of good he was proving to be at it.

They were the third lot to get off round the peri track. U-Uncle loomed up at them out of grey mist and drizzle, and Harry's hopes of a scrub rose again. Ops had been cancelled in much better weather.

He went up the ladder first, as always, so he could hang Sam up in his place for the rest to touch. Charlie was last and he waited to help him with his 'chute pack over the tail spar. ‘There you go, lad. All right?'

Charlie croaked an answer; he sounded proper poorly.

While the skipper and Jock warmed up the engines he sorted himself out in his compartment so everything was neat and tidy. He liked it all just so: log book in place, sharpened pencils lined up, Thermos flask and sandwiches out of the way – he wouldn't touch those until they were well on the way home. Never did. With all the activity, he was already forgetting about the jim-jams when a message came through from control that take-off had been delayed for one hour. They were to stand by.

Out they got again, lumbering along like polar bears in all their heavy gear. They took shelter in the ground
crew's hut where there was a good old fug-up from the coke stove. They were warm and dry, but the jitters had come back again.

Harry got out his pipe and started to fill it for something to do. Stew had joined the ground crew, playing cards on an upturned tool box; Van and Jock were talking engines; Piers was staring out of the window; Bert had his nose to some pin-up girl picture on the wall; Charlie was coughing away in the corner.

‘Here, Charlie, there's room over here.' Harry urged him closer to the stove.

‘Thanks, Harry, but I'm too hot already.'

There were beads of sweat on the lad's forehead. Running a temperature, he thought worriedly. He ought to be back in bed in the hut. He'd go and get pneumonia, or something. Come to that, he shouldn't be doing this at all. It was a job for men, not boys.

Stew had won a pile of cigarettes by the time a sergeant came into the hut with another message from Control to taxi out for take-off. Harry watched the fitters managing grins as he scooped them all up. Probably because they weren't going too.

It was dark when they moved out of dispersal. Stew was lying in the nose, shining the Aldis lamp down on the skipper's side of the peri track, guiding him along, and Harry stood in the astrodome, keeping a good look-out. When they got to the take-off marshalling point he was ready to flash their aircraft number. He could hear Van and Jock going through their final checks and kept his eye on the control cabin, waiting for the signal back.

‘It's green, skipper.'

‘Roger, Harry.'

U-Uncle surged forward down a runway that looked
like a black river. They took off and climbed upwards through the clouds. As soon as the skipper gave him the OK, he left the astrodome. When he'd wound out the trailing aerial and tuned the W/T receiver, he switched on the IFF and began his listening watch. The frequency kept drifting and he had to keep re-tuning the receiver, concentrating hard. The route could be changed, or they could be recalled and one of his worst nightmares was of missing a vital message.

Twice, Piers asked him to check the DR Compass and twice he clambered aft over the main spar, shining his torch ahead as he ducked and crouched his way down the fuselage to the compass housing forward of the entrance door. He wondered how Charlie was doing behind the turret doors.

On the way back he had to grab at handholds to steady himself against a lot of turbulence. U-Uncle was doing a right fandango. He wished it was D-Dog; he always felt better when they flew in her. U-Uncle was brand new, straight out of the factory, and maybe with teething troubles.

They cleared the cloud soon after crossing the enemy coast, and the constant flickering of gun muzzle flashes lit the sky ahead as they approached the target. The Jerries were ready for them. This was the time he dreaded most. The time when the jim-jams were worst: when they were weaving and dodging and dicing with death. No matter how hard he tried to control himself, his insides turned to jelly. He'd seen exactly what happened to a bomber copped by flak and it wasn't a pleasant way to go. And if they escaped that fate, there was another possibility just as horrible: of colliding with another bomber converging on the target. He'd seen that, too.

He flinched and ducked as another burst of shellfire rocked U-Uncle, and shrapnel struck the fuselage above him. Good job nobody else could see him. The skipper had stopped the jinking to port and starboard. Now they had to fly straight and level on their bombing run. Into the open jaws of death – that's how he thought of it. Jaws that could snap shut any moment.

The only voices on the intercom were Stew's and the skipper's; everybody else kept their mouths tightly closed.

‘Open bomb doors, skip.' Stew, cool as ice.

‘Bomb doors open.'

‘Bombs fused and selected.'

Harry clenched his fists and held his breath. Five tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs exposed to a hail of red-hot metal from below.

‘Right – right. Steady, steady . . .'

Harry wiped his forehead.

‘Left, left. Steady . . . steady . . .'

He wiped it once more.

‘Bombs gone, skip. Bomb doors closed.'

‘Bomb doors closed.'

He unclenched his hands slowly and breathed again. U-Uncle's nose was hard down, diving away from the target. Going home.

Then Stew's voice came on again suddenly. ‘Shit! We've got a hang-up, skip. The cookie. Must've got bloody stuck somehow.'

‘Pilot to wireless operator. Check it out, Harry, will you?'

Harry grabbed his portable oxygen bottle, torch and screwdriver, climbed back over the main spar once again and unscrewed the inspection panel above the
bomb bay. He aimed the torch downwards. Christ, there it was! The cylinder-shaped casing of the four-thousand pounder glinted as he played the beam. He shone the torch round the rest of the bomb bay.

‘Wireless operator to skipper. All the five-hundred pounders have gone but it looks like the cookie's got itself caught up.'

‘I'll open the doors again and try the manual. Let me know if that works, Harry.'

The skipper had a jettison control on the starboard side of his instrument panel. That might do the trick. As the bomb doors swung open a blast of freezing air rushed in. Harry kept his torch trained on the cookie.

‘Still there, skipper.'

‘OK, Harry. Stand by, crew. I'm going to see if we can shake her loose.'

Harry clung on as the Lane started see-sawing from side to side and then plunging up and down. The bomb was fused, but he knew bombs were quite safe until the fall from the aircraft automatically armed them. He also knew they tended to go off on impact or with any heavy deceleration.

Van levelled out.

‘How're we doing, Harry?'

He collected himself and shone the torch. ‘Still there. Hasn't budged at all.'

‘I'll give it another go.'

He staggered and lost his balance as the bomber leaped about again. The torch flew out of his hand.

‘Any luck this time, Harry?'

He fumbled for his mike switch as he crawled about the roof of the bomb bay. ‘Sorry, skipper, I dropped the torch. Just a moment.' Clumsy fool, he thought, scrabbling desperately about in the darkness.
Letting them all down. If they didn't get rid of the bomb somehow it'd mean landing with it on board. If the skipper did a smooth landing it could be OK, but if he didn't . . . or if something went wrong with the undercarriage and they had to belly land . . . Don't be so pathetic, he told himself. No point starting to think about things like that. Looking for more trouble. Just find the bloody torch. His groping fingers finally located it where it had rolled away aft. Thank God, it was working. He hauled himself back to the inspection panel.

‘It's still there, skipper.'

‘Can you try releasing it manually, Harry?'

He went back to get the stick kept in his tool kit. He'd never used the blessed thing before – had no occasion to – but the hooked wire at its end was supposed to be able to release the shackle holding a bomb, if you could reach it. He shoved his arm down into the bay, stretching as far as he could towards the cookie, probing desperately with the stick.

‘Sorry, skipper – can't seem to do it.'

Jock's voice came over. ‘If we have to carry that lot back, we'll have dry tanks before we cross the English coast. An' I wouldna fancy ditching with the extra weight.'

Nor would Harry. The cookie would take them straight down. He angled the torch along the underside of the bomb-bay roof.

‘Wireless operator to pilot. How about if I try making another hole nearer with the fire axe? It might be easier.'

Stew clicked on his mike switch. ‘I'll give him a hand, skip. Reckon two of us'd have a better chance.'

‘OK, Stew. Mid-upper and rear gunner, keep watching out for enemy fighters. They'll be around.'

That'd be all they needed. Harry started hacking at the aluminium roofing over the bay and then Stew appeared carrying another fire axe. Together they chopped away furiously until they'd opened up a hole large enough for a man to lean down into the bomb bay. With the doors wide open, the slipstream was a howling gale, the cold bitter.

Stew motioned that he'd be the one to have a go. Well, fair enough, it was his bomb, so to speak. He knew all about them. Harry handed him the hooked stick. He grabbed hold of Stew's parachute harness as he lowered his head and shoulders through the jagged hole and hoped to God his hands wouldn't be too numb to hold on if Stew fell through the whole way. The harness wouldn't do him much good without the parachute.