‘This doesn’t feel like fighting a war.’
‘I told you before: don’t knock it. The old man will call for you when he’s ready.’
‘Which old man?’
‘The one with the scythe and the long grey beard.’
I asked Frohlich if I could fly with his crew, using the excuse of checking Albie out after I retrained him.
‘No.’ Just like that.
‘No. Just like that? Why?’
‘We like you, Charlie. You fixed up Albie just right.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But your trips have run out. Maybe your luck has. We think that you should stay on the ground until you’ve earned more karma. Maybe you used up all you had, going to Germany last month. Leave it out.’
‘What’s karma?’
‘It’s like directed luck; only you have to earn it, it doesn’t come free.’
‘How do you earn it?’
‘By being good.’
‘I am being good.’
‘Be good for a bit longer. Then we’ll take you.’
‘Is that Jewish. That karma?’
‘No, it’s universal. It’s Buddhist.’
‘But you’re not a Buddhist.’
‘How do you know? Perhaps everyone is Buddhist.’
‘They can’t be. We’re fighting a world war: several of them. Buddhists don’t kill people.’
We were in the recreation room at Hazells Hall, which was our HQ building: it had a nice little bar. Frohlich was thrashing me at billiards. The rest of his crew were sprawled in and over comfortable old leather armchairs with books and magazines. He extended his left arm, and moved it around to include them all.
‘Neither do we,’ he said.
His navigator looked up from his book and smiled at me. He’d heard it all before.
The next pilot I asked was a small guy, like me. A dark Taffy named Tippett. He said, ‘Good idea. Tomorrow night if the light’s all right?’
‘Thanks, sir.’ He was an officer type, and I was doing the asking, after all. ‘This will really help me.’
‘And then you’ll be more help to us. That’s the idea.’
I thought that I could put up with him for six hours. Just.
Frohlich’s crew touched me by coming to see me off. Then Frohlich said, ‘This is a mistake, Charlie.’ In that preacher’s tone I’d come to recognize.
‘That’s what my dad always said I was.’
In the timber-clad parachute shed disguised as a barn, they put us crew through the same routine as the two Joes with the one-way tickets. We had to prove that our clothes bore no labels, and that our pockets were empty of anything except escape gear. I was left with just my old fibre ID tags, and my pay-book, to say who I was. Then we had to wait for the Joes, because the packers had already loaded stores containers into the aircraft. The two Joes, a scared-looking man and a woman, were taken behind canvas screens for the business. I was surprised to hear them both being offered the option of walking away from it. I heard the man say, ‘No. It’s fine,’ too loudly. I didn’t hear the woman.
The telephone rang in the shed whilst they were being checked, and I was called over. It was Goldie, the CO.
‘Sorry to butt in, Bassett, but I thought you’d want to know your papers have come through. We’ll get them ticked up, and you’ll be an officer by the time you get back. Party tomorrow night. Congrats.’
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll have to spend all that money you gave me.’
‘. . . and the rest of it. Good luck tonight.’
I said Thank you, and put the receiver down. I suddenly tasted bile in my mouth: that was the fear. On my last squadron no one would have dreamed of wishing you good luck, for fear of bringing down the other thing on you.
We trudged to a bloody old Stirling which was more patches than aeroplane. The pilot was cheerful: I’d picked a cretin for my first operational sortie from Tempsford. The pretty WAAF had given me a peck on the cheek and had said adieu: no one had done that to me before, either. I trooped out to the heap with the two Joes and the crew, which included a wisecracking Dispatcher. Nerves. I was last to board and turned instinctively to dog the door shut behind me. Their rear gunner, who hadn’t said a word to me so far, nodded, and double-checked the door. I liked that: always go to war with a cautious man alongside you, not a fucking hero. The Joes were strapped into side-by-side seats against the fuselage skin. I had to sit on the floor of the blanked-off bomb-bay with the Dispatcher, our backs to a bulkhead.
The pilot started and ran up the four Hercules engines one after the other. The last one fired up rough. He shut them down, and then tried again. This time they ran perfectly. I could sense that the Dispatcher was tense. He leaned towards me and shouted, ‘It’s the mag for the starboard outer. Always was a shit. No worries.’ Aussie.
I think I must have nodded. I felt the aircraft begin to move – away from its hard-standing, and around the peri-track. This part of the trip had always seemed the longest to me: I was all right once I was in the air. Through the small square window to my right I got occasional flashes of the full moon over the trees towards Tempsford village. At the end of the huge strip the pilot ran the engines up again, against the brakes, and then there was the sensation of launch: the jerk and the slow thrust forward against the bumps, and the grumbles of the Stirling, as it prepared to throw itself at the sky.
The Aussie leaned forward, and pushed my loose radio connection into a small jack on the bulkhead behind me. I could suddenly hear the pilot’s mumbled monologue above the howl of the motors. The sense of movement ceased, and was
