Staring ahead of him, as if he was still flying. He wouldn’t answer when they spoke to him, wouldn’t turn his head to look at them. In the end they had to prise his hands off the controls and carry him out on a stretcher. Catatonic schizophrenia, they said later, when he went on sitting and flying S-Sugar in the hospital ward. He’s never said a word to anybody from that day to this. And late in the afternoon they phoned to say they’d found the four missing aircrew, buried in a large turnip field near Chelmsford. It seems they’d jumped from too low a height; their parachutes had had no time to open.
Nobody was ever going to know exactly what happened to S-Sugar on the journey home. Her bombs were gone, every single part of her worked to perfection, there wasn’t a bullet-hole or a scratch on her. No reason in this world for baling out. So they serviced her and put her back in her pan. Groupie said she could serve as a spare aircraft for any crew whose crate was undergoing repair.
What they should have done was to throw her on to the scrapheap, as we had once thrown away that Messerschmitt propeller-blade. But no one – not even Butcher Harris himself – has the clout to write off a fairly new, totally undamaged plane. And people flew quite regularly – if not cheerfully; never cheerfully – in crates where men had died, where men had been scraped off the seats. But at least we knew what happened to them. Nobody knew what had happened in Blackham’s Wimpey.
After that, S-Sugar began to dominate the whole station, as the prop-blade had dominated our barrack-room. Nobody went near her. Shadows seemed to gather inside her cockpit and turrets. She grew to twice the size of any Wimpey on the field. It was the time of the autumn spiders; they spun webs all over her, as they spun them in the hedgerows, as they spun them on the other Wimpeys. Except that flight and servicing and polishing scrubbed the other Wimpeys clean every day. The cobwebs just grew thicker on S-Sugar. The ground-crew sergeant had a strip torn off him by Groupie about it; he swore he cleaned Blackham’s Wimpey daily, but nobody believed him. Erks cycling past the pan at night were seen to steer away from it, in a half circle. There were all sorts of rumours in the erks’ mess too. Voices had been heard inside it, when there was no one about; crackly intercom voices. Then the WAAFs got hold of the story. Had anybody noticed, they asked, that no birds ever perched on Blackham’s Wimpey? Actually, very few birds perched on anybody’s Wimpey; they don’t make desirable perches, not with so many trees around – but that was the kind of stupid rumour that went around. Not that the aircrews were any better, though they never mentioned it. Aircrew are more superstitious than sailors. They all have mascots: teddy bears, old raggy dolls, umbrellas; won’t fly without them, or without peeing on the tail-wheel before they go and after they come back. So it came out afterwards that people had gone to extraordinary lengths not to fly in Blackham’s crate. Pilots with defective crates didn’t report them, just slipped their ground-crew fivers to work overtime on their personal planes, until they were fit to fly again. More than once there were unexplained fights between crews over job priorities.
Finally, the scandal reached Groupie’s ears, and he put his foot down. With all the lack of sympathy that scrambled-egg wallahs are capable of, he picked Reaper to fly S-Sugar on the next op to Tallinn. Reaper’s crew immediately put themselves on the chop list. They sat in a tight little group at ops tea, silent, sweating, eyes down, not touching a scrap of their grub. They had spent two days writing letter after letter to say goodbye to their folks back home, giving away their tennis rackets and golf clubs and altering their wills. Nobody could bear to look at them. Most people expected them to crash on take-off, and they damned nearly did.
But they came back. Came back late, made a very wobbly landing, but came back without a scratch. There were a lot of us waiting for them outside the debriefing hut, waiting to break out a bottle of whisky some cheerful type had bought either to drink with them or to their memory. All