Tuesday's War Read online

  He offered cigarettes, and when he spoke it was with a languid almost drawling accent. ‘Nice landing, Skipper.’ He held out his hand to shake Grease’s, but Grease could only offer his left. They looked odd for a moment, two men holding hands like girls. ‘I saw you touch down just before this lot rolled in – no brakes left?’

  ‘Not much of anything left, sir.’

  He laughed with us. Not a bad type. It was good seeing Grease standing there swapping jokes with a wingco as if there wasn’t a half mile of rank between them. It was often like that – out there on the runways and the field you all could be just fliers – the rank nonsense didn’t kick in until you were standing inside RAF bricks and mortar.

  ‘Care for a lift?’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, but we’ve got to wait for . . .’ Grease raised his left thumb towards the sound of the circling Lancaster.

  ‘Of course. I’ll just wait in the bus then.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Pleasure, old boy.’

  He angled off towards where the lorry was parked with a stiff, deliberate gait, like a heron stalking minnows in the shallows. I heard the door click shut, and then the engine die. I was left alongside the sparks who had been driving him. He was a ranker too – a full flight lieutenant – but you could tell he had been a sergeant; he had the look.

  ‘Your fingers don’t look too clever,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the trouble with Lancs; they either burn you to death or freeze you.’

  We both grinned: we were alive, after all.

  ‘Any other damage?’

  ‘Toff – mid upper – he’s got a cut foot, and it’s a funny shape. I haven’t told him that yet.’

  ‘I suppose you all want to wait for the other guy to get down. From your mob, is he?’ We ducked instinctively as the lost bird thundered low overhead again, looking for a way down, poor sod. The fog eddied in its wake, then stilled again.

  ‘Haven’t a clue, but . . . yeah, we’ll wait, if you don’t mind.’

  There was one of those moments when everything seems momentarily crisper, as if life comes into sharp focus, and every detail is etched on to your brain like a photograph. As if you are an actor in a film.

  What do the Japs call it? Kamikaze – divine wind? Well, it might as well have been. First I felt a tug of breeze. It seemed to blow the droplets of moisture in the air against my cheek as if I was crying again, but I wasn’t. Then it came on again, but stronger. Not for long, but long enough. You often get these eddies on the edge of a fog bank, but rarely just when you need them – like this one. It must have cut a swathe through the fog a hundred yards deep, across the runway. Control used his noddle and flipped on the lights, and our late saviour saw his one chance and went straight for the gap. Gear down, flaps down, engines cut as the wheels touched. If Grease’s landing had been unusually neat then this one was poetry. The pilot ran on, on his main wheels this time, American style, holding the tail wheel clear of the runway until the speed was off her; then he dropped her tail and pulled her off the concrete to port, and parked not thirty yards from the heap of junk we’d just brought back from Germany.

  Up close the new Lanc had no markings – it could have been a special squadron. It was brand new, I’ll tell you that. Maybe we could make some sort of a trade for it. Pete was good at deals.

  However, we came to the conclusion that the Lanc which had saved our collective bacon was a new replacement kite being delivered by one of those civilian pilots. They were definitely second division jobs. That might seem a bit bloody silly – but like all first-time crews at the start of their tour of ops, we were a bit like that: God’s gift to the RAF. The position of operational aircrew was one we thought the civilian bus drivers couldn’t attain. And now we owed one a favour, and had the sneaking suspicion that this guy – whoever he was – was probably a better pilot than Grease. Somebody was throwing away my team’s carefully constructed social status rule book. You can see that it was an interesting little problem: but not half as interesting as when we actually faced the bastard.

  He didn’t bother with the short ladder that drops beneath the fuselage door in the Lanc. This small pilot, with the face of a fourteen-year-old boy, just swung his feet over the ledge, dropped the four feet to the grass and strolled over. Then he pulled off the old leather flying helmet he wore (over an equally old Sidcot suit – probably from the twenties) and black curls tumbled to her shoulders. Yeah, you heard me: her. Some girl. Some girl who had just given us the rest of our lives back, after the RAF had nearly thrown them away.

  Grease always held that the first thirty seconds you spent with a woman dictated whether you were going to make it or not. He believed that a man needed to be noticed. It made him unpredictable around females. This time it made him throw himself lengthwise on the grass and kiss her flying boots. My first glance at her face told me it didn’t usually come to rest in humour lines, because she grimaced. As she pulled her helmet clear of her hair she looked serious, even a little cross, like a schoolteacher – but then Grease on the ground in front of her earned a smile, and a little gurgling laugh.

  ‘Is he always like this?’ she said.

  I stepped forward and held out my hand. ‘He loves flying, and he loves girls and he loves still being alive. So you’ve brought out the worst in him,’ I said.

  She couldn’t move because Grease had wrapped his arm around her ankles, but she asked me, ‘And you are?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at my name – I’m Charlie Bassett, the sparks,’ – that smile again – ‘and the man at your feet is Grease McKenzie, sergeant pilot and our skipper. He’s Canadian.’

  The other five came forward to introduce themselves and give thanks for deliverance. The Pink Pole, who was short (a lot of the good rear gunners were), stood on the small of Grease’s back to make up for it, and raised her hand to his lips. When Grease stood up there was grass and mud on his clothes, and the stupidest damned smile on his face that I’ve ever seen a man wear.

  She said, ‘I’m Grace . . .’

  Grace said her family name was Baker, although it turned out to be Ralph-Baker (she said ‘Rafe’), and she held back the double clanger until she knew us better. Later in the tour, after we had met a few, we came to realize that many of these civilian delivery pilots were ex-airline pilots or racing types, who had all-round flying skills we could only wonder at.

  She dealt with this very directly whilst we were crammed into the back of the truck, and driven around to the admin block. Grease said, ‘That was a great touchdown,’ but you could tell from his voice that, as tired and in pain as he was, he was brooding over it.

  ‘How many hours have you got?’ Grace asked him.

  ‘On Lancasters?’

  ‘On anything.’

  He looked relieved, and waved his good arm expansively. He said, ‘250; a few more. What about you?’

  ‘Thousands,’ she said, and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke. Turkish: Passing Clouds. I guess that we all looked away for a moment.

  I cut into the silence, and asked her, ‘Did you overshoot and go round again because you heard me on the radio, screaming for you to get out of the way?’

  ‘No, Charlie. I heard you, but not in the way you think. There was nothing on the radio except the duty controller giving me my approach, and asking me to get a move on. My coccyx heard you.’

  Marty snorted, and Conners Conroy grinned. I could see him in the gloom.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the small bone at the bottom of your spine,’ offered Toff. Then he said, ‘Ouch!’ because he was beginning to feel his ankle.

  ‘I know what it is, dummy. That still doesn’t help.’

  Grace said, ‘When something important is going to happen – when I have to do something, and do it now, my coccyx vibrates: tingles, if you like. It’s a danger signal. As soon as my coccyx spoke I put the throttles through the gate, switched the mixture, lifted the wheels and the flaps, and went round again. It never fails.’

  I wasn’t sure if she was serious. ‘It could have killed you this time, if you hadn’t got down through the fog,’ I said.

  She said to me very gently, as if I was a child, ‘If you had landed on top of me, I would have been killed for certain, wouldn’t I?’

  By the time we had crawled up to the red brick admin buildings the fog had seeped into the truck, and into our bones. A door opened letting out a faint light. The man who came through it was big, portly and wore an RAF greatcoat over flannel pyjamas and carpet slippers.

  ‘Are you the intelligence officer, sir?’ I asked him.

  ‘No sonny, the medical officer. What’s the use of you being debriefed by an IO who doesn’t know where you’ve been, what you were supposed to be doing there, or whether you’re shooting a line? Do that on your own station when you get back. Hop out now, chop chop. Who needs the medicine man?’ He spoke with a rich, plummy Welsh accent.

  Grease took charge again. ‘You’d better see to Charlie’s fingers: they got too cold, and Toff’s got a flakky foot – and I suppose you’d better have a look at my arm. The kite was pulling to starboard all the way back, and I had to pull it the other way: now my arm’s locked up.’

  Whilst he was saying this Toff hopped out on to the road, and fell down because his ankle had finally stopped working. The fog now felt horribly refreshing, but I suddenly wanted desperately to lie down and go to sleep: the voices around me faded in and out like radio signals caught in the Heavyside Layer. I heard the sparks who drove us saying something like, ‘You keep these three Doc; we’ll shoogle up the mess boys and find some breakfast.’

  Shoogle, I thought – he must be a Scot: Glaswegian most likely.

  My memory stops there for some
hours. They must have done whatever they needed to my fingers, and bandaged them up. I was always awake early in the morning – a habit I never managed to break – and found myself cleaned up, wearing service flannel pyjamas, on a ward in the station medical unit. I felt good. Toff was in the bed opposite, snoring as loudly as the flak which had almost killed him, and they can’t have had a busy week on the Kent airfield because we had the ward to ourselves. Grease, Marty and the rest of the crew were competing in the snore competition, lying sprawled fully clothed on top of other beds. Marty was cuddling an empty beer bottle. He liked cuddling things. Grease was cuddling the girl from the new Lanc – they were curled up, her back to his front, like a couple of commas: his huge arm was around her. I remember thinking, So that’s how it is, then someone farted, someone else began to stir, and I noticed that my fingers hurt.

  For a fighter station the whole place was astonishingly well organized. All of my gear was hanging in a long open locker by my bed, my uniform had been brushed down, and even my flying boots had had a once over. Nothing had been stolen: if they treated their sergeants like this I was in the wrong command. As the others came round it was obvious that they had been on a bender, and probably felt worse than the Toff and me. They were horribly hungover – but they got both of us out of our pits, washed, shaved and approximately dressed us, and found a stout walking stick for Toff.

  The MO caught up with us having an illegal private breakfast at a table in a corner of the officers’ mess. It was quiet as a church. Didn’t anybody from here fight before noon?

  ‘You all right, Sergeant?’ he barked at me.

  ‘Somebody’s put bandages all over the ends of my hands; I’m not sure that there are fingers in there any more,’ I said.

  ‘Nor am I. Get a pal to cut up your food for you for a couple of days, and see your own MO when you get back. Now; what about you?’ he said to Toff.

  The Toff sniffed and said. ‘My foot’s flopping about a bit. Doesn’t go where I tell it. I borrowed this stick.’ He waved it.

  ‘I know: it’s mine. Get someone to do your walking for you for a couple of days, and see your own MO when you get back.’ Then he pulled the chair back with a scrape, sat down with a beaming smile, and added, ‘You’d have to pay for that in Civvy Street!’

  The tea kept on coming forever, and it remains one of the happiest breakfasts I remember.

  We hadn’t expected an engineering officer who spent his days polishing Spitfires to come up with anything original to do to a fucked-up Lancaster, and we weren’t disappointed. He was a lieutenant in a set of snow-white overalls – the cleanest engineering officer I had ever seen. He came marching starchily up to us after the table had been cleared by the mess servants, glared at us distastefully, and waited for our response. Grease leapt up, overzealously stamped to attention and saluted, his eyes fixed about three feet over the EO’s head. There was a problem with his salute. It was a right hand fingernail inspection: Nazi-style. Every time he was close to promotion he fucked it up with a stunt like that. We all followed suit, but with proper salutes. Except for Toff, who tried and fell over. The fat MO grinned, and Grace giggled.

  ‘Sergeants in the officers’ mess. Irregular. Don’t like it,’ said the EO.

  ‘Station commander’s order, sir. We slept in the hospital,’ said Grease.

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Your kite’s a bloody mess. What’s more we’ve got nothing heavy enough to pull it out of the way.’

  ‘Sorry about that, sir.’

  ‘Not your fault, Sergeant. Just bloody inconvenient.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Anyway. Came to tell you that she’s not going anywhere under her own steam again. I’ve spoken with the salvage and reclamation johnnies, and they’ve put things in train. Which is what you’ve to do, by the way – spoken to your squadron leader. You’re to proceed to your home station by rail as soon as you can – they miss you apparently. Spoken to the watch officer – there will be rail passes at the gatehouse. Bus in about an hour’s time.’

  ‘Sorry I won’t be flying her home, sir.’

  For the first time in this exchange Grease wasn’t taking the piss. There was a change in his voice and in the EO’s attitude. He sighed and said, ‘Yes, I know, Sergeant,’ and there was a short embarrassed silence, which he broke with, ‘It’s very irregular, but seeing as you’re here now, I suppose I better get these bastards to open the bar and buy you all a drink.’

  The MO closed it down with, ‘Well said, Willy,’ and the rest of us added noises, the sum of which meant that although we would be embarrassed to be seen drinking with fighter johnnies, we could swallow our pride if someone else was buying.

  Grace wasn’t buying. The EO was trying to become the living embodiment of his Christian name and do a job on Grace, but she wasn’t buying. Secretly, I think that he, too, was fascinated by the thought that someone so small could fly something so big, which she capped by explaining that the first multi-engined aircraft she had delivered had been Sunderland Flying Boats – each about as big as Blenheim Palace: they even have beds for half the crew and a fully equipped kitchen. Eventually he asked her when she was taking the new Lancaster away, and to where.

  ‘The controller wants me away between 1415 and 1430. I’ve got to drop it off at an airfield near Cambridge – Bawne. But I probably shouldn’t be telling you that. Then I get a long weekend off. My family live close by,’ she said.

  The EO initially thought that we were laughing at him, and looked miffed – he was buying, after all; then Grace twigged that we were laughing at her, and popped her mouth into the upside-down smile – there was something going on here which she didn’t understand, and she didn’t like that. So we rearranged ourselves in a line facing her, performed a crew-left-turn, and held out our right fists to her, thumbs up. Miss Baker was filing a flight plan for the field from which we had set out twenty hours previously.

  ‘In that case,’ said the MO, ‘you boys have got time, guests or not, to buy me another couple of pints before you leave.’ It would have to be on a slate. We flew without English money.

  Flying Down to Rio – you’ll have seen that film, of course, fleet-foot Fred and gorgeous Ginger – anyway, flying home took less time than it takes to see the film. The new Lanc smelled of paint and hot, new wiring, not of piss and fear: she was fast, responsive and skittish: a pleasure to fly in. Bloody thoroughbred. We all huddled south of the main spar, but Grease flew the dickey alongside the pilot, where the engineer usually parked. Fergal didn’t complain: he went to sleep. Marty produced the stub of his lucky pencil, and we all wrote our names on the aircraft’s inside skin. It was obvious to us that we wouldn’t be flying our dear old girl again, and this new one would suit. There was a sort of unwritten – forgive what turns into a pun – squadron rule, that if a team signed an aircraft it was more or less theirs. It was a bit cheeky for a crew of rookies like us to sign a brand new kite, but seriously, you don’t look at life straight on when you measure it in days rather than years. The point is that no one liked flying a kite which had been signed by another crew; although you had to, from time to time. So we were making a pre-emptive strike to put off the opposition, because there was always a scrap for a new aircraft.

  Grace flew with old pre-war goggles on her forehead, and a map strapped to her left leg like a single-seat pilot. When Conroy told her later that he was impressed by her navigation she gave him a just how dumb are you? stare, and said that she flew along the railway lines. We learned that she had bucket-loads of stares where that came from. Her dad would have said that it was breeding; mine would have called her a stuck-up cow. Sure enough, when she turned the folded map over there was a creased and tattered Railways of Great Britain map underneath. She made a bloody good landing too and, directed by Grease, parked it on the hardstanding we’d vacated with our old lady just the evening before.

  Three khaki vehicles set out in leisurely fashion from alongside the watch office caravan as soon as the props stopped spinning. There was the CO’s nasty little Hillman, another Bedford crew lorry and the meat wagon. Our CO was Squadron Leader Delve. We called him Bushes on account of his huge moustache. It took me weeks to get used to the fact that his principal method of communication was by shouting at the lower ranks. It would be nice to write that we would have flown through the gates of Hades for him: I should cocoa. Although many did, of course.