and looked at us, with a dead-white face under a rounded leather flying-helmet.
I shut my eyes and screamed again. My throat was already sore with screaming. A very solid hand reached out towards me, grabbed my arm.
‘Steady, Gary,’ said Dadda.
He had been there almost since we landed, seven hours before. Just got debriefed, then went to his billet to fetch a couple of things and straight back into the stinking bowels of S-Sugar. He clutched the few things against his flying-jacket now, with one hand. A fair-sized black book, and what looked like a string of fat black beads, with a little black cross on one end. ‘Relics of Maynooth,’ he said, with a wry, weary grin.
‘I thought you’d be back,’ he added. ‘And that will be petrol in the whisky bottle, young Kit? I knew I didn’t have all that much time.’ Kit had the grace to gape.
‘Give me that bottle, Kit.’
‘I’m going to bloody do it!’ said Kit, very defiant.
‘No, you’re not,’ said Dadda. ‘I’m going to do it. I’m skipper.’ Kit was so shocked, he forgot to argue.
Dadda turned and looked at the smashed RT set. ‘I’ve tried to persuade him to go.’ He sighed. ‘But he’s very young, and very proud, and very brave, and, sadly, very much in love with his beloved Führer. I don’t think I’ve done any good, with all my talking.’
‘Has he said anything?’ asked Billy, curious.
‘No,’ said Dadda. ‘Nothing at all. It’s been me doing all the talking. Now let me have one more go, like good lads. Get outside and wait for me. And stand well back.’ He began to kick and scrape together on the walkway the debris of the night: greaseproof paper from the corned beef sandwiches, discarded maps and navigational instructions, my own Morse-code pad. Then, thoughtfully, he unscrewed the whisky bottle and poured out the clear liquid.
The sharp, dangerous smell of petrol filled our nostrils.
We bundled out, suddenly chattering like schoolboys on Bonfire Night, full of a sick sense of a treat to come. There were a few erks cycling past through the thinning mist, and some ground-crew kicking their heels under A-Able in the next pan. That sobered us. There were more people about than we’d thought. We spotted Dadda’s old thirty-hundredweight parked to one side of the perimeter track, and hung about there. A ground-crew WO approached with steady ringing tread.
‘What are you lot on?’
We shuffled. Aircrew-sergeant’s stripes, to a ground-crew WO, are as thin as the toilet paper they’re printed on. And it was unusual for an aircrew to go out to a Wimpey, the morning after an op. The ground-crew think they own the bloody crates; they only lend them to us for ops, and they even make us feel guilty when we bend them.
‘Waiting for our skipper,’ said Kit humbly. ‘He’s giving us a lift.’
‘You lot get in our hair,’ grumbled the WO. ‘We’ve got a lot to do, you know.’ He kept looking at us; he wasn’t going to go away. He could sense the excitement bubbling up inside us; suspected some sort of practical joke.
‘Flight-lieutenant Townsend’s lot, are you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kit, so quiet you could hardly hear him.
Dadda emerged down the ladder, in a rush occasioned by the respect we all have for the effects of burning petrol. He spotted the WO instantly, and walked across, long-boned and relaxed. He was smoking a fresh fag; tipped the ash on to the WO’s shining toecaps, as if he wanted him to notice. The WO backed off, surreptitiously wiping each ash-covered toecap in turn on the back of the other trouser leg.
‘You shouldn’t be smoking aboard an aircraft, sir,’ he said, half cringing, half bad-tempered. Still uneasy.
‘I shouldn’t be alive at all,’ said Dadda. A bit of the old aircrew boast, putting ground-crew in its proper place. ‘Sorry. One forgets about the smoking. C’mon, gang, let’s go and find some ham-and-eggs.’ He opened the door of the thirty-hundredweight so casually that I wondered whether he’d lost his nerve and scrubbed the whole thing. We turned, to pile in the back.
Behind us, the WO called out, ‘Hey!’ Softly, to himself.
We swung round, and saw the leaping red flicker in the Wimpey’s cockpit. Saw the first bit of fabric crinkle and blister and peel back from the airframe. Saw the first red serpent of flame lick its way upwards, eating into the mist overhead.
‘Hey!’ the WO shouted again, and began to run towards S-Sugar. But doped fabric burns fast. Halfway there he changed