better. God, was it Matt doing the ground-hopping? Could Matt really fly this crate like that? I saw the dim glow from the navigator’s light glinting on the syringe in Dadda’s hand; saw the needle jab into Billy’s rounded, straining backside. His shirt and trousers had come apart, and I could see the pale, shining, girlish skin of his back. Billy stiffened at the pain of the needle, then almost immediately began to relax. Next second, there was an agonizing bee-sting in my own backside.
‘Hey,’ I shouted, ‘that’s not fair!’
‘Sorry,’ mouthed Dadda. ‘Meant for him.’ He pointed at Billy.
I was getting all weak and warm and drowsy, as the morphia took over. I was frightened I would be too weak to hold Billy; but he had had his jab first: he was even drowsier than me.
That was the last I knew. As the terrible screaming started again, I slipped away from it into warm darkness.
When I came round there was no noise but the roar of the engines. Billy the Kid was still out cold, snoring gently. I wondered who had drawn the great big blue marks under his eyes with a pencil. Kit was sitting at his table, still wearily doing his sums. He had no need of his navigator’s light now, because sunshine – early, horizontal sunshine – was streaming in through our dirty triangular windows. I made some kind of movement with my arm, and at the third time he saw and came over.
‘That noise has stopped,’ I mouthed.
‘Halfway across the North Sea. Got weaker and weaker. Then it . . . seemed to give up.’ He held up five fingers. ‘Five minutes to Oadby.’
‘Any damage?’
Kit tried to smile, and gave up. The guy with the blue pencil who’d been drawing on Billy’s face had been drawing on Kit’s too. With a slightly shaky hand, he gave me a flask-top of cold coffee and said, ‘No damage. Not a bullet hole. I’ve checked.’
‘We’re going to get this home?’
‘Dadda says this crate will always get home.’
‘What d’you mean?’
But Kit got up and hurried away forward. I heard the note of the engines change, and felt the aircraft tremble as the flaps went down.
Dadda’s landing was a perfect three-pointer; never a bounce. We shook Billy awake, got out on to the tarmac and stood round and peed on the tail-wheel. I caught myself wishing our pee was pure sulphuric acid, and that the tail-wheel would dissolve and all S-Sugar with it.
The ground-crew sergeant came up, glancing at wings, tail, everything.
‘Good trip?’
‘Piece of cake,’ said Dadda. He grinned; dried-up saliva wrinkled his lips into strange patterns. ‘But the RT needs seeing to. And there’s no point in arguing this time – it’s smashed to hell.’
Kit actually laughed, even if he couldn’t quite finish it.
The debriefing WAAF kept asking me what happened, and I kept on saying, ‘Nothing. Piece of cake.’
I came up slowly out of the depths of sleep. The barrack-room was cold and empty. Waking up was a mistake. I’d been happy asleep.
I went to the window. Autumn Fenland mist. Boundary fence. Mud this side and mud beyond, fading away into infinity. Through the fence a few dirty, ragged sheep stared at me, chewing. I despised them for their keen desire to stay alive. Personally, for the first time, I wished to be dead. Oh, not your Pearly Gates opening and St Peter waiting to pin a gong on you. I’d settle for lovely, black-velvety nothing. Not see, not feel, not think. I tried to remember Clitheroe Grammar School, Mum and Dad, and a girl called Betty who wrote to me every week. But the memory of them stayed grey and remote, like photographs in a tattered copy of the Daily Mail, blowing around the dispersals.
This, I thought, without much real interest, was the effect of flying in Blackham’s Wimpey. This was the huddled, inert state that Reaper’s crew had reached, and Edwards’, just before they got the chop. In this state, the chop was inevitable. Dieter Gehlen, dead, was claiming more victims than ever. He was deadlier in Blackham’s Wimpey than he had ever been in a Junkers 88. To the glory of the Fatherland. And there was no reason why he should not continue to claim victims. Blackham’s Wimpey, as Dadda had observed, would always come home. Probably unmarked. It could fly two more whole tours. How Gehlen’s ghost managed to keep flak away, and other Jerry night-fighters, God alone knew. But obviously if Blackham’s Wimpey bought