We drove over to Lydd airfield, which looked pretty empty before we arrived. No aircraft, no activity . . . another bleeding ghost station, although everything was being kept in pretty good order. You noticed the we of course! I wasn’t alone. Ivy was on a day’s stand-down, bored out of her brains, so I hid her under a blanket on the back seat as I went through the gate. The boy with the Stirling sub-machine gun was back. His hands and fingers looked as blue as his greatcoat. It was a still, clear, blue sky with not a puff of cloud, and as cold as nuns’ tits. I’ve never liked Decembers, even although I was born in one.
After a hundred yards she scrambled over into the front passenger seat, and gave me a peck on the cheek. ‘Thanks, love.’
‘What for?’
‘Rescuing me from Lucy. She’s determined to get my knickers off before I go.’
‘You mean she’s . . . ?’
She laughed at me. ‘Christ, Charlie, didn’t you know? Where have you been all of your life?’
‘Not around people like her, that’s for certain!’
‘Sure?’
It was the way she said it that left a question in my mind: I’d known one of Lucy’s friends, remember.
‘What are you going to do while I’m working this morning?’
‘What will you be doing?’
‘Haven’t a clue. Course 42 can mean anything, apparently. They haven’t told me yet.’
‘Maybe it’s better you don’t know.’ She gave me another little peck on the cheek, which caused me to swerve into the path of a small Ford milk float. We left the driver with a face whiter than his bloody milk. Ivy said, ‘Sorry,’ and, ‘I’ll probably go for a walk.’
But life’s never quite that simple is it?
I saw two guys standing by a C-type hangar so we trundled over there. A sergeant and a corporal. Both very smartly turned out and obviously impervious to cold. This did not bode well. The corporal held the door open for Ivy; she probably gave him a bit of leg as she slid out, because I saw him grin immediately.
The sergeant asked me, ‘Pilot Officer Bassett, is it, sir?’
Someone had asked me that not too long ago. I’ve never had all that much bother remembering my own name, so I took the piss, ‘I think so, Sergeant. That’s exactly who I was the last time someone asked.’
He smiled a smile I didn’t like, and handed me a sheet of paper from his big mitt. His big mitt seemed to be covered in old scars: some things count more than rank. It was a class list headed up Course 42, and the date. I was the only student listed, and in the column headed Comments, alongside the student’s name, someone had printed Comedian. Time to beat the retreat.
I said, ‘Sorry, Sergeant. I’ve been on Civvy Street too long.’
His big lumpy face broke into a friendly smile. The sort of smile that conceals a Mills bomb. ‘Don’t worry, sir; you’ll find a sense of humour helps a lot where you’ll be going . . .’
‘Where am I going?’
‘About five thousand feet up, sir, for the one o’clock jump – first a small-arms refresher for a couple of hours, and then we’re going to stick a ’chute on your back and fling you out of an aeroplane.’
‘I’ve already done that once,’ I wailed, ‘and I’m still here. I passed. I don’t want to try it again!’
‘Then hard luck, sir. Someone up there must think it might be useful wherever you’re going next. They want to know if you can still do it.’
‘What happens if I make a mess of it?’
The corporal put on his most funereal of faces and told me, ‘Service burial, full blues and a firing party. Don’t you worry, sir; we’ll do you justice.’
The bastards must have known that I’d baled out of a disintegrating aircraft high over France in 1947, but it wasn’t going to make any difference.
Ivy thought it was all a bit of a hoot, and asked them, ‘Can I stick around and watch? Nothing like this ever happens to me.’
Amos ’n’ Andy drew away for a few secs, before the sergeant replied, ‘Don’t see why not, miss. You can even come up with us if you like, as long as you signs the blood chit: there’s no one watching today.’
Inside the hangar I learned to strip and fire the Stirling submachine gun. The bloody thing jammed twice.
‘Prone to jamming,’ the corporal told me, ‘usually at inconvenient moments. I prefer the good old three-o-three meself, with a fucking great bayonet on the end to make my point.’ Then he looked at Ivy and added, ‘Begging your pardon, miss.’
She smiled, ‘No problem, Corporal. Can I have a go myself?’
I’d seen this coming: she’d started to scuff her feet on the floor, and already looked bored. Ivy was better at it than me, of course, and it chose not to jam on her. Maybe it preferred women. Then we moved on to the .45 automatic pistol. It looked large enough in my small hands to club an elephant to death with, but I managed better with it. When Ivy took her turn, the kick of the damned thing threw her hand holding it vertically above her head and the explosion closed her eyes. She could still hit the target though, and I wondered if her fiancé actually wanted a girlfriend trained in small-arms firing.
Eventually the sergeant said, ‘It’s a bit parky in here.’
We didn’t disagree – my toes felt numb – and he led us away to a small Nissen hut which had probably been a ground-crew rest-room. It had a new electric stove, and he had the makings of our lunch: tea and bacon sarnies – no butter. It would have been nice to have had a bit of butter.
