ends of the cut wires touched the airframe. Frantically, I tried to wrestle the shears away from him. We were still fighting like maniacs when Dadda separated us. We stood in a triangle, mouthing soundless screams at each other.
Dadda took a rescue hammer and smashed the shut-off RT set. The sparks flew, I can tell you; lucky the hammer had a rubber handle. Silence. The soundless noise of the engines once again closed like a fleecy blanket over our ears. Dadda went back to the cockpit. Kit and I sat and stared at each other. I don’t think either of us expected the world to make sense any more. We had got accustomed to living in a nightmare. Kit even produced a flask of coffee and offered me a cup. Coffee in a nightmare. But it still tasted like real coffee – as real as wartime coffee ever is.
We looked at our watches. Kit mimed, ‘Half an hour to the Dutch coast.’ Then he turned his head to look at a section of the airframe, puzzled. It was vibrating oddly, under our backsides, under our ungloved hands. Had we been hit? Had the engines developed trouble, or gone out of synch?
No, it was more like the rhythms of speech. Voices talking. A voice . . .
Suddenly, the voice burst through again, like fire from a hosed-down plane; a fire the firemen thought they had under control.
‘Meissner, Ritter! What’s holding you up? Are you dead?’
And then the screams, the godawful, burning screams, drowning the noise of the engines, shaking the airframe, tearing at every joint in our bodies. Nothing, nothing left in the world but screaming.
‘Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’
Kit and I clung together, held on to each other in a barricade of arms, of living flesh and bones. There was nothing else to do. It was all that kept us in existence. That, and the slight sway of the airframe that told our legs that Dadda, somewhere – Dadda a million miles away – was still flying her.
The screaming gave back a little, like an army preparing for a fresh assault. Fell to a sobbing.
‘Mutti, mutti!’
And we felt another movement in the airframe, towards the tail. Something was moving there, coming slowly towards us. Kit reached down and pulled aside the curtain round his navigator’s table. I thought it odd that his little table-light was still shining. I thought it odd that it still existed at all. It belonged to the real world. He swivelled it towards the tail, and we both looked.
A man hung there, crucified.
For a moment, for me, the universe rocked on its pivot. Then I saw it was only Billy the Kid, face-mask, oxygen-hose and intercom-wires dangling down his front like entrails. His face was that white sheet again, with three holes burnt in it now: his eyes and his silently-screaming mouth. His freckles stood out like blood splashes. And he wasn’t crucified; his arms were braced against the airframe to hold himself up. As we watched, he drew in a shuddering breath and screamed, silently, again. He wasn’t looking at us; he wasn’t looking anywhere.
Somehow, Kit started towards him. Immediately, Billy let go of one side of the airframe. He had a hatchet in his hand; the little hatchet many rear-gunners carry to hack their way out of the turret, in case of a crash. I wanted to run away. But a world without Kit was unthinkable, and Kit was still advancing on Billy.
The hatchet came up; the hatchet came down, on Kit’s head. Fortunately, it struck the upper airframe stringers in its descent and lost most of its force. Kit grabbed Billy’s wrist, and the next second we were all three struggling on the Duralumin walkway, a mass of sheepskin and bony, painful knees, air-hoses and radio-cables. Then we had hold of one of his arms each, and the hatchet was lying at our feet. Kit kicked it from where he lay, and it vanished into the darkness. He grimaced at me; his face-mask had worked loose. Then he nodded up the fuselage to where the rest bed was bolted. Rest bed, ha-ha. Lie-and-groan bed; bleed-your-life-away-and-your-mates-can’t-stop-it bed. We got Billy there. He was no longer struggling very hard. His mouth was open and there were long strands of saliva festooning it.
‘Hold him down,’ Kit mouthed.
I buried my head in Billy’s shoulder, wrapped my arms and legs round his and clung on. Now I sensed Dadda was bending over us; I felt