Elsie tried to get up, but he was too strong. She went to scream, just as his other hand clamped down over her mouth. He let go of her wrist and his hand began to fumble at her left breast—squeezing, hurting. She wriggled and writhed, but couldn’t free herself.
‘Everything okay?’ a voice suddenly called from outside.
Elsie squirmed in silence, prising at the fingers braced around her mouth.
‘Yes, all good,’ William answered calmly.
‘Who are you?’
‘Pilot Officer William Smith,’ he stated.
‘Just you in there?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And the bicycle?’
‘I borrowed it,’ William replied without hesitation.
Elsie cried out, but the words were trapped behind his fingers. The man—whoever he was—began to walk away, taking with him any hope of her being rescued.
Daniel Winter strode purposefully across the aerodrome in his pilot’s uniform, oblivious to the air raid siren, oblivious to the Folkestone Auxiliary Fire Service tackling a mammoth blaze in one of the hangars, oblivious to the troops hurriedly refilling the giant bomb craters that scarred the runways.
He was agitated, couldn’t settle. He reached the ‘B’ Flight dispersal huts and found the other pilots of 32 Squadron scattered about the place. He sat down in one of the basket-weave chairs, gazing up at the fine warm skies, his head resting back on his yellow Mae West life jacket. His usual nervous anticipation before a scramble was worsened today. He sat up, touched his bloodied lip and glanced across the airfield.
Burying his face in his hands, he tried to remove the acute sense of guilt that he felt, to change his train of thought to something more positive. He thought about last summer. Larking with his friends, fishing, swimming and idling in the daytime and dancing and cavorting at Bobby’s in the night-time. The prospect of war was nothing more than a fleeting conversation carelessly banded about. To Daniel and his generation, it had had no meaning, no gravity.
How naïve, he now thought, as he watched the graceful, skilled flight of a seagull as it arced across the sky, oblivious to the death and destruction that surrounded it. It flew low, then disappeared behind Reindene Wood in the distance, drawing into Daniel’s eye-line the columns of grey smoke on the other side of the aerodrome that disfigured the otherwise perfect sky.
The other pilots milled around uneasily. Half of the men sat in the dispersal hut, playing cards. Perry flicked through the same magazines as yesterday, still not actually reading them. Kedwell and Barker smoked and chatted in subdued voices. Wheeler read a book but hadn’t actually turned the page in a long time. Jones paced, as he always did. All of them, though, were experiencing the same restless, nervous energy that came in the drawn-out moments before a scramble. The orderly had reported to control that ‘B’ Flight was at readiness. So now it was just a waiting game. A waiting game in which the aircraft also seemed to take an active part. Daniel’s Hurricane, engine still hot from the previous flight, had been refuelled and now stood, like a slender thoroughbred racehorse, with its nose raised haughtily into the air. Brooding. Eager. Anticipating.
Daniel chewed his lower lip, then stood up from his chair and stared at the sky, wondering if they were going to be put back up again today. When he got up there, in flight, the prickling shroud of foreboding, that clung to him at dispersal, was always quickly discarded, like a superfluous layer of clothing.
He exhaled sharply, stretched, then walked into the dispersal hut. It was a simple wooden building with a few chairs and tables in the centre and a row of camp beds at one end. An orderly sat at one of the tables, waiting for the telephone to ring.
Daniel ran his hands through his thick blond hair, trying to calm himself. He glanced casually around the walls—they contained the same juxtaposition of scantily-clad women and aircraft identification posters that were in every dispersal hut in every aerodrome in the southeast.
He thought of all the pilots who had died—it should be their pictures on the walls of the dispersal huts not Rita Hayworth, Joan Fontaine, Betty Grable and the rest of them. It was like the Russian roulette of the skies: who would make it back and who wouldn’t. It was an unavoidable, yet largely undiscussed fear that they all had. Grief for another pilot who had failed to return was always necessarily private and short-lived. Perhaps after the war—if he survived—he would find the time to mourn them all. It sickened him to admit it, but the names of some of those who had failed to return were now ghosted in his mind, gradually losing the fabric of the person that they had once been. For others, he remembered their names but their faces were now gone, like smooth, uncarved statues. He hated himself for it but could neither explain nor help it.
He shook the feeling, double-checking the only thing on the walls worth bothering with: the Order of Battle. Daniel found his name and call sign. Red 2.
Then his blood turned to ice as the phone rang behind him. One little ring before the orderly answered. Daniel dared not turn around.
The call could have been about anything. Earlier, it had rung to inform them that Annie’s tea van had broken down in Folkestone and was running late. Two minutes later, it had rung again when someone had wanted to speak to Wheeler. If the people calling had known what the blasted ringing did to the pilots’ already strung-out nerves, then they wouldn’t have bothered calling with such trivial matters.
But Daniel could sense the purpose of this call.
‘Squadron scramble base angels twelve!’ the orderly shouted, sounding the alarm.
Suddenly, under the jangling of the
