Jack lifted off at a quarter to ten for a leisurely five-to-six-hour drag to Cyprus. It would depend on the head or tail winds. I stood with our pilot as he smoked his last fag: he explained that he usually got tail winds in the Eastern Med at this time of the year – it could give him another 30 knots. Only two of the AC conscripts were left now, and Mister Bates looked hung-over. They’d replaced the other erks with packing cases for the base at Akrotiri. I didn’t like the look of the way they were stowed, and made the Luqa handlers do it again. That had given them another half-hour’s work, and they gave me the look as they sloped off.
Bates said, ‘You seem to know what you’re doing, sir.’
‘They would have shifted with the first bit of turbulence, and started flying about all over the shop. I ran a small freight outfit at Lympne before they invited me back to the RAF. I know how to stow aeroplanes.’
‘And will they use your expertise in that when you get to Egypt, sir? No, they’ll probably put you in charge of motor spares or something. What were you in the war, if I might ask, sir?’
I turned so that he could see my half wing.
‘Sparks.’
‘Big jobs or small jobs?’
‘Big ones. Lancasters at Bawne. And you?’
‘I missed it. I joined from school in 1948. Now I’m a nursemaid.’ It wasn’t his fault but it seemed to me that half the RAF we had now had managed to miss the war.
He seemed curiously bitter towards the system this morning. Might as well be direct: so I asked him,
‘What’s the matter, Mr Bates?’
‘A couple of the lads we brought out yesterday were on that bus last night. Blown to pieces. Their great adventure didn’t even last a bleeding day, did it, sir?’
‘Not your fault.’
‘That’s what the CO said – I’d already handed them over to the base here. Doesn’t make a blind bit o’ difference though, does it?’
I knew what he meant. There were a couple of mornings on the squadron in ’44 that I looked around the empty chairs in the Sergeants’ Mess after particularly bloody raids, and felt guilty at still being there. I leaned over, and squeezed his shoulder.
‘No, it doesn’t make any difference. Some are lucky and some aren’t, and that’s all there is to it. Nothing to do with us. I fancy sticking a waxer in Mr M’smith’s coffee once we’ve settled down – how about you? You can ask those two lads to join us, if you like. They look scared to death.’
He nodded and said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ before he turned away.
We droned east. The sea was a dark, deep blue and sparkled in the sun. We saw one large trooper gliding smoothly west, cutting the water and leaving a wake a mile long – full of lucky buggers going home, I thought. I went up to the office and talked to the crew for a while. The radio operator was an old sweat from Bristol. He’d done two full tours in the Forties, and had finished the war in his second OTU. We had some acquaintances in common, and had even flown on the same raid once.
M’smith slept with his cap over his face for a couple of hours. When he woke up he leaned over and tapped me on the knee to distract me from my book.
‘That girl, Charlie . . .’
‘Which girl?’
‘That one last night. She was a bit of a cracker, wasn’t she?’
‘She was a terrorist, Heck.’
‘Surely not, old fellow.’
‘She told us not to get the Liberty bus, didn’t she? Then some bastard blows it up. She was paying us back with our lives: one good turn deserves another.’
He thought about this for a few minutes, and then he tapped me on the knee again.
‘Don’t you think we should tell someone?’
‘I already did. You can go back to sleep.’
I liked M’smith, but fervently hoped that he would be posted to one end of Egypt while I got the other. He would be a great fellow to go on the skite with now and again, but not to work with. I didn’t want him watching my back. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what shape or size Egypt was these days, or the fucking Canal Zone to which I was bound. I’d have to find a library somewhere, and some old Brit who’d spent half his life there. There was bound to be someone who could tell me what was what.
Two hours later we were letting down over Cyprus in clean air: that odd staggered ber-bump as the main wheels dropped down – never together – and the odder moment when the pilot selects a hefty degree of flap, and the Wimpy seems almost to float motionless above the ground as he throttles back. I had been right about the stowage, although I felt no satisfaction about it. An hour out of Malta we had skirted one of those sudden Mediterranean squalls that come from nowhere, and Jack had been bounced about like a shuttlecock. Both the erks were sick, but their recovery times were short. They’d have a story to tell their families if they made it home.
We were collected from Jack by an AC2 in a strange six-wheeled wagon with ten seats and a canvas top; prewar I’d say. He had his own idea about what should happen next, but M’smith soon put paid to that. He gave him a friendly poke in the shoulder and said, ‘Bars please, my man. Theirs first . . .’ indicating Bates and his two strays, ‘. . . and then ours. OK?’ He did seem to have a way about him.
The Officers’ Mess was a double Nissen hut with a bar running down one side.
