Break of Dark Read online

  ‘If they blew this bloody crate up now, they could save a navigator as well. And a wireless op and two air-gunners and a lot of petrol.’ Kit was the real joker, even then. Life and soul of the party. Only, his big blue eyes were stary that morning, the whites showing all round like they seldom have since.

  We dropped back on to the tarmac.

  ‘I always wanted to be a landgirl,’ said Matt. Since he was six foot two and the only one of us who had to shave every day, it was quite funny.

  We stood and talked and froze. We found out that a year ago, we’d all been in the sixth form. We found out that Matt had been the top pilot of his course, and Kit top navigator. Mad Paul, the front-gunner, and Billy the Kid were top stuff, too; reaction times like greased lightning. (They played a stupid game involving slapping each other’s hands; anyone else who joined in always lost, and it really hurt.) Only I was mediocre. I had passed-out halfway down the wireless ops’ list.

  Still we stood. Were we all there was? Was Matt’s horrible idea coming true? Did we have to take this thing to Germany on our own?

  Just then a thirty-hundredweight drove up. A pair of long, thin legs emerged from the cab, stooped shoulders and a cap pushed back to display a wrinkled forehead and balding nut. He didn’t look at us; he walked across to C-Charlie with the precarious dignity of a heron hunting frogs. We gaped at the apparition. His uniform, which carried wings and a flight-lieutenant’s rings, was thin and grey as paper.

  ‘Look at that uniform,’ said Matt, not bothering to lower his voice. ‘He’s got some time in.’

  ‘Probably in the pay office,’ said Kit.

  ‘You can make blues look like that over a weekend,’ said Billy. ‘Bit of bleach in the water, and a razor-blade to scrape the fluff off . . .’

  The apparition kicked the starboard tyre violently, stalked on and began doing a Tarzan-act on the starboard flaps. The Wimpey is a pretty whippy, flexible sort of plane. Some pilots compare flying one to lying in a hammock, others to making love to a woman. The steering-column keeps nudging your chest, the engines nod up and down in a regular rhythm and the wing tips actually flap in flight. This guy had the whole plane rocking in motion, the way he was thumping hell out of her.

  ‘Shall I go and tell him it’s government property?’ asked Matt. We all got those stupid giggles again. The apparition ignored us, until he had given the tail-wheel a final kick. Then he walked over to us.

  He knew we’d been taking the mickey. He found us amusing.

  ‘Let’s get you into your bunny-suits,’ he said, ‘and see if this thing flies.’ We bundled into the back of his thirty-hundredweight, all except Matt, who he kept with him in the front. All I will say about the way he drove is that I was sick halfway back to the billet. Of course, I was sitting over the exhaust.

  ‘If he flies like he drives,’ said Kit, ‘we won’t make the coast.’

  ‘The German coast?’ I gasped, pulling my head back in over the tailboard.

  ‘The English coast,’ said Kit.

  New flying-kit has a life of its own. It makes you feel like a giant panda, trussed up for its journey to the zoo. It trails things that wrap around any knob or lever available; it makes you a yard wide so you knock things off shelves that you think are miles away. Passing anybody else in the confines of a Wimpey is like dancing with a stuffed bear. You feel sweaty and cut off from everything.

  Dadda’s gear wasn’t like that. He had battered all the life out of it; it fitted him like a second skin. In places it was creased and wrinkled like rhinoceros hide; in other places it was worn smooth and shiny. There were great dirty patches near the most-used pockets. He looked more like a decrepit heron than ever.

  We took off smoothly and easily. Piece of cake, I thought. Then he told me I had too much volume on the intercom, though I don’t know how the hell he knew. Then he told Kit he talked too much. I was still laughing silently about that when the WT set hurled itself violently into my side; lots of painful knobs too. Next second, I was dangling, helpless, in the middle of the fuselage on the end of my safety-harness. Next second, I got the distinct impression I was hanging upside down. Certainly three pencils and a map shot up in front of my face.

  I was sick again, and now there was no tailboard to lean out over. Further forward, the Elsan toilet broke loose with a terrific clatter and came sailing past my head. Thank God it was empty. First I thought my last moment had come, then I hoped it had. When I got myself together a bit, Dadda told me to turn the intercom up. I was just reaching for the knob when the world turned upside down again. I heard Kit say, in a dreamy voice,

  ‘He can’t fly upside-down at zero feet.’ Kit had somehow strapped and braced himself so he could look out of the astrodome. ‘I can see ducks sitting in mud over my head.’ His face was lit up like a child’s at a funfair. After that, all I did was to keep my eyes shut, play with the intercom knob, and try to keep my guts inside me. And listen to Kit’s running commentary.

  ‘I think we’re strafing Spalding . . .

  ‘Two cars have just crashed . . .

  ‘He’s knocked three bricks off a factory chimney . . .

  ‘We’re flying down a canal – below the level of the banks . . .’

  Mind you, I wouldn’t swear to the truth of any of it. Kit always shot a line, given the least chance. But it felt like it. And there was a lump of bracken caught in our closed bomb-doors afterwards; that even Kit couldn’t have faked.

  We finally reached the ground and crawled out. Dadda began belting hell out of the crate again, this time in the company of the ground-crew sergeant, and not sounding too pleased.

  ‘He can fly,’ said Matt judiciously. ‘But only Spitfires.’

  ‘Can’t you tell him this one’s got two engines?’ added Billy plaintively.

  ‘He’s mad,’ said Mad Paul. That, from Mad Paul, was approval.

  ‘I don’t know what he does to the enemy,’ said Kit, ‘but by God he frightens me.’ He lit a Woodbine and did his impersonation of an aircrew-recruiting poster, a foot nonchalantly on the Wimpey’s undercart as if he’d shot it himself.

  I was sick again, over the undercart, and his foot. It was the only comment I could make. All those silly buggers’ eyes were shining, as if it was Christmas. Already they were calling the flight the Battle of Spalding.

  I set my mind to finding out more about this nut of a pilot. I wanted to know who was killing me.

  His name was Townsend. He was an Irishman, a Dubliner. Spoke that lovely clear English that only a certain type of Irishman speaks. When he said ‘the Castle’ he meant Dublin Castle. He was a Catholic; drove (like the devil) every Sunday morning to an ugly little yellow-brick Catholic church in Wisbech. It was the only thing he didn’t joke about. They said he’d spent two years at Maynooth, intending to be a priest and then a monk. But he’d left, saying it made the years too long. That’s why they started calling him Father Townsend, which got shortened to Dadda. At least, that was the story. Maybe they only called him Dadda because he was so much older than the rest of us. Thirty-five if he was a day.

  After Maynooth, he seemed to have drifted. He taught English in some kind of left-wing free-school in Germany, till the Nazis closed it down. He’d seen Hitler before Hitler became famous; talked about him with neighbourly Irish spite as a busy, worried little man in a crumpled, belted raincoat. Somehow, that cut Hitler down to size for us. Later, Kit started the ‘Paddy O’Hitler’ craze that was unique to C-Charlie, though other crews tried copying us. Night-fighters became Paddy O’Hitler’s chickens. Bremen Docks, on fire, became Paddy O’Hitler’s rickyard.

  ‘Rickyard’s well alight tonight, Dadda!’

  ‘Maybe Paddy won’t be able to pay this quarter’s rent.’

  ‘Maybe the great landlord in the sky will evict him.’

  ‘Chicken dead astern, Dadda.’

  ‘Wring its bloody neck,’ said Dadda dreamily, as he fell down the sky in his famous corkscrew, and the Elsan broke loose again. Half-
full this time, and everybody laughing like drains. Over a silly childish game. But op by op the game kept us laughing; kept us alive. And maybe Billy did wring a couple of chickens’ necks.

  After he’d lost his German job, Dadda seemed to have drifted on round the English Catholic schools, teaching languages. Never staying long. Until the war came, and he learnt to fly. This was his third tour of ops. You only had to fly one. Most crews didn’t last half a tour before they got the chop. People said Dadda’d survived because he didn’t care if he lived or died; that was the way things went. People said that when the war was over, there’d still be one Wimpey flying over Europe in the dark, with Dadda at the controls, wondering where the war had gone to. They said he was mad as a hatter; flew like a lunatic.

  They didn’t know him. Actually, he didn’t miss a trick. Every day we polished the perspex of our own turrets and windscreens, and he inspected them. ‘A fingerprint’s bigger than a night-fighter, acushla. We don’t want chickens hiding behind fingerprints.’

  On a raid, he always flew dead in the middle of the bomber stream. But at his own chosen height, which never appeared in Air Ministry Regulations. Three thousand eight hundred feet. That’s a very healthy height. The light flak’s lost its sting, and the heavy flak – the 88s and 102s – is unhappy and slow. And any night-fighter has got the ground and church steeples on hills to worry about, as well as you. Especially if it tries to attack from underneath, which is a favourite stinking little trick.

  Besides, three thousand eight hundred feet gave Mad Paul the chance to have a crack with his front guns at the light-flak gunners and the searchlight-crews. I dare say it didn’t do Jerry much harm, but it did Paul a lot of good. Gave him something to do; left him no time to think. Time to think you do not need; people die of it. Dadda kept everybody busy. He let Matt really fly the crate, once he knew how. Didn’t just leave him sitting and sweating like a stuffed duck, which happens to some second-pilots. Kit was kept busiest of all: new readings, new courses, hot coffee all round; it suited him. Dadda even found something for me.

  ‘I’ve got you a new box of tricks, acushla. A little beauty called Tinsel.’ Tinsel was a third radio, which I could use to search out the Jerry fighter-control network. There was a crawling fascination in hearing the voices from Tomtit and Bullfinch, earnest German voices trying so hard to shoot us down. Then, at the crucial moment, I could black out their transmission by sending them the sound of our starboard engine, neatly recorded by a microphone in the enginenacelle. God, it made those Jerries hop and swear. I tell you, and I’m not shooting a line, I’ve got the best collection of German obscenities in the RAF.

  ‘How did you know I spoke German, Dadda?’

  ‘Read it up in your records, acushla, before you were a twinkle in Groupie’s eye . . .’

  We had a private joke, too – Dadda and I. Any time a night-fighter got on our tail, I was to shout, ‘You stupid Dummkopf, Otto, can’t you see I’m a Heinkel in disguise?’

  I think it was when he first suggested this, and I laughed till I was nearly sick, that Dadda became a kind of God, even to me.

  The business about Blackham’s Wimpey started the night we raided Krefeld; at ops tea. Ops tea is the special meal they give you before you go over Germany. Best meals we ever got. Usually a heap of bacon and fried bread and two whole precious fried eggs. Trouble is, even if you’re in a good mood, you keep thinking: the condemned man ate a hearty meal; and if you’re feeling rotten you feel you’re a pig being fattened up for slaughter. The fried bread turns to sawdust in your mouth, the fried eggs turn to glue, and the edges of the crispy bacon start burrowing into the lining of your stomach. But you get your ops tea down somehow. It may be the last thing you touch before you do your flaming-torch act; except for a face-wash of lukewarm coffee, halfway across the North Sea.

  Crews sit together at ops tea, always. Even if they hate each other the rest of the time. Everybody’s life depends on everybody; there’s no room for hate. Love, or you’re a dead duck. Instant Christianity. Did you know, someone actually wrote a book for aircrews called God Is My Co-pilot? You used to find copies in the bogs, with half the pages gone. Anyway, crews sit together. And they’re either very noisy or very quiet. If they’re quiet, people reckon they’re on the chop list. We do a lot of wondering who’s on the chop list. Certain barrack-huts lose crew after crew. Falling in love is fatal. There was one gorgeous WAAF in the parachute store; none of us would even speak to her. Anybody who looked twice at her got the chop.

  Anyway, this night we were sat next to Blackham’s lot. We didn’t like Blackham’s lot, though, looking back, I can see that the only thing really wrong with them was Blackham. Colin Blackham, their skipper. Blackham the bastard. In civvy-street, he was a Yorkshire hill farmer, a real Yorkshire tyke. Pig-ignorant and hard with it, with a hill farmer’s attitude to life and death. Would send his granny to the knacker’s yard, if the price was right. Bradford Grammar had dragged him through school certificate, and he never forgave them for it. Well over thirty, nearly as old as Dadda, he was still only a flight-sergeant, and he made a loud-mouthed virtue of it. Always started arguments with ‘Well, I’m only a flight-sergeant, but . . .’ And every time you saw him he was arguing. Horrible sober and worse drunk. A long, bony jaw and a big nose and beady dark eyes, and a hill farmer’s broken veins in his cheeks, and black hair that escaped the Brylcreem after five minutes and stood out all over his head in greasy spikes. He always wore a filthy white polo-neck sweater that not only showed under his BD top but came down nearly to his knees. The best thing about him was, he was pretty small. A little bullock who would always settle a logical argument with his fists, if he was losing. Even after what happened to him, I still hate him.

  As I said before, Blackham’s lot were next to us and making even more noise than usual. They all mimicked Blackham, like we all mimicked Dadda. They were discussing that stupid Air Ministry instruction about machine-gunning farm animals on the way back from raids. To undermine Adolf’s war effort. Of course, most crews ignored the instruction. We all had a shrewd idea what we were doing to women and children in the German cities, but we didn’t have to look at it, and we didn’t talk about it either. But being told to kill horses and cows in broad daylight . . . Anyway, if it was light enough and you were low enough to shoot at farm animals, you’d better save your ammo for the fighters.

  Dadda hated the idea, and, being Dadda, mocked it. He worked out it cost us more for the ammo than it cost Adolf for the cow, and Adolf got to eat the cow anyway. But Blackham’s lot loved the idea; went in for it (if you could believe them) in a big way. Last time out, they said, they shot at a Belgian girl herding cows and not only killed the cows but her dog as well; and made her dive into a ditch so fast, they saw the colour of her knickers. By now Blackham’s face was red and sweating. His noise was stirring up the whole mess-hall. Some tables were giving him dirty looks, others were starting to tap out Morse code with their knives and forks, or gouging bloody great chunks out of the table-tops. It was unbearable.

  So I said, ‘Aah, shut your face, Blackham.’ Loud enough for everyone to hear. Next second I wished to hell I hadn’t.

  There was a horrible silence. Blackham turned to me slowly.

  ‘Did you say something to me, son?’

  I couldn’t open my mouth.

  ‘No,’ said Dadda, ‘I did. I requested you to shut your face, Flight-sergeant Blackham.’

  Blackham looked from one to other of us, baffled. He wasn’t stupid; he knew who’d said it. But he was frightened of a trap.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kit. ‘I distinctly heard our honourable skipper request you nicely to shut your face, Sergeant Blackham. Is that not so, gentlemen?’ He turned to us.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Billy.

  ‘Beyond any reasonable doubt,’ said Matt.

  ‘Indubitably,’ said Mad Paul.

  Blackham got to his feet with a heave that sent his mob scattering. Dadda sat still, laughing at him. One poke a
t Dadda, and the squadron would have lost Blackham for good. The noise of drumming fists and knives and forks from the other tables was thunderous.

  ‘Flight-lieutenant Townsend. A word with you!’ And there was Groupie, smiling his smile of pure ice. Groupie was a hero; bagged four Jerries, they said, in World War One. Didn’t use his single synchronized Vickers gun; froze them out of the sky with his famous smile. Anyway, he came across and put his arm round Dadda’s shoulders and held a perfectly fatuous conversation about the stirrup pump and fire buckets in ‘B’ flight office. Somebody down the mess-hall gave a loud snore; but when Groupie looked up, the wise lad was finishing off his eggs.

  Krefeld was no worse than usual. The PFs – Pathfinders – seemed to have stayed sober for once and had dropped a new kind of marker: a bright red ring of fires that even the incompetent were able to get their bombs into. There was a smell of burning silk and disturbed chemicals in our share of the atmosphere over the target. Better than the Sunday-lunch smell you get from burning city centres. Matt saw a Lane buy it overhead; a shell from a 102 blew its wing off. We were glad it was a Lane, and not anybody we knew. Those toffee-nosed bastards actually cheer when they hear we’re on a raid with them. We’re sent in first, you see, and we fly slower and lower, so we’re easier targets. I mean, a Lane can carry five times our bomb load, so why do they send us at all, except as bait for the flak and fighters?

  On the way home we met clouds, thank God. It had been a clear sky all the way to Krefeld, and a three-quarters moon, and we’d felt as if we were doing a striptease in Adolf’s front garden.

  Now skippers react differently to clouds. Some get inside and stay inside, even when the clouds are cu-nimbus. The buffeting inside cu-nim can bash a damaged plane to bits, and all that static electricity doesn’t exactly mix with a crate full of petrol fumes . . . And you might meet somebody you know inside. A Wimpey’s wing-tip can kill you just as dead as a cannon shell. And the fighters can still track you on their radar and jump you when you come out blind.