‘Sir?’
‘Your little trip. We’re throwing you back up into the wide blue yonder for an hour to see if you can still cope. You know the idea: if you fall off a horse get back into the saddle as quick as you can. Some can’t, you know; not after a serious crack-up.’
I couldn’t resist it.
‘I wonder why?’
I deliberately left off the sir, and Goldie just as deliberately ignored it. He had my open file on his desk. He closed it with a snap, gave me the big eye and muttered, ‘Dismissed.’
That’s what the umpire used to say to me with such relish at school cricket matches. Bastards.
*
Would you believe it? It was another fucking Stirling. And Cliff was going to fly the bloody thing. We walked out to it with Strainer, who was a buckshee Flight Engineer, and a nineteen-feet-tall Navigator. Cliff referred to him as ‘Big Job’: he filled a comfortable space below the Skipper. Strainer looked, frankly, as if he wasn’t all there. He reminded me of some of the types in the big ward. I shook hands with them both, remembering briefly how courteously Sir Thomas More had greeted his executioners.
Cliff asked me, ‘Windy?’
‘A bit, sir, I think. I usually am until we get going.’
‘That’s all right then.’
‘Yes. What’s the form?’
‘Air test. Then some other poor sod gets to fly it tonight.’
It was painted overall black, and had no squadron codes or other numbers. The only other colour was provided by the red, white and blues, and they still looked too much like gunnery targets.
‘Anything else I should know, sir?’
‘The MO wants us to wind it up to five thou or so, and then put you on oxygen to see if there’s any permanent damage to your lungs. Don’t worry: if they collapse or blow up on you he’s told us what to do.’
‘Which is?’
‘Pull your parachute ripcord and sling you out apparently: get you back on terra firma before us.’
My feet were on the rungs of the ladder by now. No way back. The two sergeants had preceded me into the kite, and Cliff pushed me up the steps in front of him, eager to get going, before he missed too many pints.
Strainer sounded bored as they pre-flighted the Stirling, and yawned between calling back the checks. Cliff paused and said, quite casually, ‘Wake yourself up, cunt, when you’re flying with me. Otherwise Charlie here will take you back, and drown you in the Elsan. He’s murdered two types already; a third won’t make any difference to him now.’
He sounded very believable. I wondered how much he knew: I’d witnessed one murder on my old station, and knew of two others. Even helped dispose of a couple of the bodies. It didn’t seem like a big deal when you set it alongside the number of people we’d killed with our bombs every night. The problem was that I couldn’t recall ever mentioning it to Cliff.
As usual I found I didn’t mind the take-off so much as long as I was up at the front looking around. It was a clear, sharp day, and some of the trees and hedgerows were showing off a faint blush of early green. The tall buildings, like the manor and the church, threw exact shadows on the grass. The Stirling lifted off slower than the Lancs I had been used to, and Cliff seemed to hold her on a lot longer than Grease, my old Canadian pilot, would have. Nevertheless he pulled her off smoothly, with none of that sideways yaw that radial-engined aircraft are notorious for. I noticed at once that there was something ominously competent about his flying. He flew in shirtsleeves, with the mask and mike dangling at his throat, holding it up with one hand when he wanted to speak. He addressed Strainer again.
‘OK, cunt. Get lost. Go down to the dispatcher’s berth and strap yourself in there.’
‘Aye, Skip.’ That was Strainer. He had an odd glaikit grin. Made him look not all there. After he’d left the flight deck Cliff called me forward to fill his seat. I asked, ‘Why do you treat him like that? What’s he done?’
‘Nothing. Other ranks. Thickos. I bloody hate them.’
‘Funny. I used to feel like that about officers. Did you hate me when I was still a Sergeant?’
‘No. I knew you had it coming. Do you want to talk, Charlie?’ But before I could answer he pulled up his mask, and called the Nav.
‘Hey, Big Job . . . give me a course.’
‘Where to, Skip?’
‘Out around Cambridge somewhere; that’ll do.’
‘Roger, Skip. Fly 0030 for now. I’ll give you a correction.’
‘0030,’ Cliff said into the mask, and then let it drop. ‘Why doesn’t the silly bugger say nearly north, which is what he means?’ he asked me.
‘It’s the way we train them. What do you want to talk about?’
‘The two guys the RAF thinks you killed. One at Bawne, and one in London somewhere. Did I get that right?’
‘How did you know about that?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I suppose not. I didn’t bump them off, as it happens. That was Pete, our rear gunner: you probably know all about him. He blew them away with a Colt .45 that an American friend had given me. You probably know all about him too. If Pete hadn’t killed them they would have murdered him, and me. He did them in first.’
‘Like self-defence before the event?’
‘You could call it that.’
‘A court martial won’t. They’ll hang him.’
‘They’ll have to find the bits first. He got blown to pieces over Holland by our own trigger-happy flak gunners. Now you know why I won’t join the brown jobs.’
‘So we executed him anyway, in a manner of speaking, and you inherited his radio and his car?’
‘Someone had to.’
‘The two dead men were policemen. Did you know that?’
‘One was English and one was a Pole, like Pete. They weren’t proper policemen. Did
