‘Busy schedule.’
‘Not busy enough: most of the girls in the band will be pregnant by the end of this tour, if they’re not careful.’
‘But not you?’ I chanced it.
‘Trust me, darling, I’m a doctor.’ And I’m Charlie’s Aunt!
‘You fancy joining us for a drink afterwards?’
‘Sorry, Charlie; some old wing commander’s already booked me. Nice meeting you again, though. Nice to know the jabs I gave you kept you alive.’
The stage bell was ringing for round two. I said, ‘The one you didn’t nearly killed me.’
She frowned and said, ‘Say again . . . ?’
‘Never mind. I’ll tell you next time.’ We split. Crowds of KDs swirled between us, and Daisy and I concentrated on getting our seats back without spilling the beer.
I said, ‘You were a bit quiet, Daisy.’
‘She’s very glamorous: I didn’t know what to say.’
‘She sits down to pee, Daisy: just like you. I shouldn’t let any of the rest of it bother you.’ I was reverting, wasn’t I? The magic dust must have been wearing off.
Daisy was quiet, but as the beautiful band filed back on stage she whispered, ‘Sometimes, Charlie, you can be absolutely foul.’ Me and my big mouth, I hoped I hadn’t lost my only ally in Watson’s camp.
It didn’t stop her giving me a goodnight peck on the cheek after I’d walked her back to her quarter.
‘Thank you for a lovely night, Charlie. Just for a few hours it was like being back at home.’
‘You’re not still mad at what I said?’
‘Of course not . . . and thank you for giving me my photographs back.’
‘What photographs?’ I asked, and stole a real kiss before I left her there. It seemed to me that the taste of her kiss was still on my lips when I climbed into Hudd’s bloody aircraft the next morning.
It was another Varsity, with an especially modified passenger door to enable the passengers to jump out. To jump out three thousand feet above the ground, that is. It was a very pretty aeroplane, but you won’t be surprised to learn that it was hate at first sight as far as I was concerned. It was painted a washed-out tawny colour on top, and a washed-out bluey colour underneath, and the two colours sort of washed into each other: I’m sure you get the picture. It had Australian national markings, in order to comply with international law, but they were so small that you had to look for them. I thought it was a serious sort of aircraft.
Hudd’s man hawked like an Arab and said, ‘Triffic camouflage, mate: no one can see us up there.’
‘They won’t have to, will they? There will be just us and the mountains and a few thousand goats. But they’ll hear us coming for miles.’
‘You Poms always find something to whinge about; you know that?’
I was still digesting Hudd’s briefing. The Varsity door slid open instead of being hinged, and it had been enlarged. All I had to do was sit on the ledge, and roll forward when they told me to. And I didn’t have a plonker to pull. I was hitched up to the aircraft on a static line which deployed my parachute after I was in clean air. That was the theory of it, anyway. If the main chute didn’t deploy, I had a small emergency job on my chest, and I could pop that by hand. If I could find a hand. The really silly bit was a package the size of a kitbag tethered around my ankle. It was supposed to hang six feet under me as I fell, and hit the ground before I did. Hudd cautioned me about getting tangled up in it as I rolled . . . and, because of the extra weight of course, I was going to fall a lot faster than I had before.
‘Piece of piss,’ Hudd said after he had finished explaining.
‘No, Hudd, pissing myself is what I will be doing on the way down.’
‘I’ll make sure I’m not underneath you then, mate; so you can jump first. You’ll be all right, Charlie. I had you investigated when your name came up.’
‘What do you mean investigated?’
‘I got some pals to ask some of their pals a few questions. They said you were all right. One RAF copper called you a homicidal Englishman. You really shoot one of your officers a few years back?’
‘Nobody’s supposed to know that. The bastard went mad, and tried to kill me. What was I supposed to do, lie back and think of England?’
‘Keep your hair on, mate. You can shoot as many of the bastards as you want as far as we’re concerned.’
‘But you’re an officer yourself, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah; but I didn’t start out that way, did I? And it still don’t feel right.’
That did it. It broke the tension in me. I stuck out my paw and shook his hand.
‘Then I’m your man, Mr Hudd. I thought I was the only one in uniform who felt like that.’
‘Christ no, Charlie. There’s bloody thousands of us. Mount up now, before you make me cry.’
What was that song from the 1930s? ‘Here we go into the wide blue yonder’. The bastard composer must have written it for me.
Daisy was standing at the end of the airstrip waving to us with a coloured scarf. The Varsity’s twin Hercules radials blew sand all over her, and for a moment I lost sight of her. When I picked her up again, I could swear that bloody lion was sitting meekly alongside her.
The Varsity bounced a couple of times on its short nose-wheel as the pilot ran her up against her brakes, and then he let her go. She was a smooth old bitch, even if I say so myself. When was that? About 10 o’clock on an April morning in 1953. What I
