dropped her pencil. Then Dadda offered to prove that his crew did not lack moral fibre. In the morning, he said, we would do a solo raid up the Pas de Calais, strafing gun-sites from zero feet. If Groupie would care to accompany us, he would have the chance to observe personally if the crew of C-Charlie lacked moral fibre. It would have been pure suicide, of course. But as Groupie fixed his gimlet eyes on each of us, we gazed right back and nodded in turn. I even managed to stop myself swallowing.
We had Groupie over a barrel. He hadn’t been expecting this. And too many people were there to hear our offer, including the WAAF, whose eyes were standing out like chapel hat-pegs. Threaten as he might, news of it would be all over the base by morning. Mind you, I wouldn’t want to do Groupie an injustice. He’d have come up the Pas de Calais with us, if it would have done the war effort any good. But I think he saw then that we were another kind of problem. He rubbed out LMF after our names, and put in Crazy instead. The Crazies do exist; we’d met them. There was one air engineer I came across in London on leave who’d done four tours in Lancs. He would lie on his bed and try to trim his toenails with a .38 revolver. Crazies are hooked on destruction. They’re clean over the horizon, and never coming back.
Groupie went off into his private sanctum and closed the door and got on the blower, to somebody you could tell didn’t welcome being woken up. Maybe it was Butcher Harris on his bath night. They say old Butcher plays with bombs in his bath, like admirals play with boats. We couldn’t even hear Groupie’s end of the conversation properly, but the tone was ‘How the hell do I get out of this one?’ Then Butcher, or whoever it was, had a bright idea. You could tell that from the sudden change in Groupie’s tone. A moment later he came out and told Dadda to take his crew and every last bit of their kit and possessions, and load them into C-Charlie and depart at crack of dawn. Dadda asked what about C-Charlie’s overdue engine-overhaul? Dadda was told where he could stuff C-Charlie’s overhaul. Or rather, it would be done after arrival at the new station. The expression on Groupie’s face implied he wouldn’t break his heart if C-Charlie crashed on the way.
Dadda asked where he was to fly us to. Groupie told him St Mawgan, in Cornwall.
‘Long-range attack on Tokyo via Mexico City,’ muttered Kit to me. Groupie froze him with a look, but said nothing. We were officially Crazies now, and no longer under his command. All he wanted was to see the back of us.
We reached our billet feeling slightly drunk, and began throwing stuff into our kitbags; throwing stuff at each other. Billy proved what a rotten shot he really was by heaving a boot through the window. We all thought that was an excellent idea, and joined in. When there were no barrack-room windows left (thank God it was only September) and no mirror either (we’d all have liked seven years’ bad luck, after months of the prospect of less than seven hours), we sat on our beds and talked.
‘What’s St Mawgan?’ asked Paul, taking a breather from working out how to get his motorbike inside C-Charlie.
‘Probably missions of an extra-hazardous nature,’ said Matt solemnly, and hiccuped.
‘Like delivering milk to the Tirpitz and picking up the empties,’ said Kit.
Just then we heard the thirty-hundredweight pull up outside. We loaded up, including the motorbike. It was starting to get light and we espied an RAF policeman leading a dog on a bit of string towards the small-arms firing range. It was a little runt of an Alsatian thing, with ears that were still floppy. We all knew where it was going, and so did the dog. Its head was down and its tail drooped. Aircrew aren’t supposed to keep pets, but they do. They ask their mates to take them over, if they get the chop. But if their mates get the chop as well . . . The police were always taking dogs up to the firing range, with a shovel in the other hand. Anyway, Kit makes for this policeman with terrible speed, and we all take after him like the clappers. Including Dadda, who