is quietly swearing to himself. The policeman pulls up, a look of amazement and then of acute distress on his face.
‘I don’t like you,’ says Kit. ‘I don’t like you at all. I would not wish to have your company. I would rather have the company of that dog.’
‘I’m only obeying orders,’ said the policeman, licking his lips.
‘So is Heinrich Himmler,’ says Kit, rather unreasonably I thought. I mean, Himmler gets far more overtime pay than an RAF policeman. Kit holds out his hand. ‘That’s my dog.’
‘Who says?’
‘We do,’ we all chorused. He looked from one to the other of us, bewildered. It’s rather fun being an official Crazy.
‘Give him the dog, Corporal,’ says Dadda, very crisp and RAF.
‘Yessir,’ says the policeman, standing to attention with relief and giving a very fine salute. Oh to be a single-celled animal . . . We bundle back into the truck.
‘What you going to call him, Kit?’
‘Dieter. Leutnant Dieter Ernst Gehlen. But Dieter for short. He’s one of the crew now. He buys it, we all buy it. He lives, we all live. He flies. Every damned op. What the hell has he got to lose? If he wasn’t here with us, he’d be dead by now. Pure profit. He’s gained five minutes’ life already.’ He fondled Dieter’s ears affectionately, and Dieter licked his face with some enthusiasm. He’d lost his chop-list look already.
At precisely o-four-thirty-five hours, C-Charlie got clearance for take-off. With a bomb load of fifteen kitbags, one BSA motorbike and one happy dog. Nobody was supposed to know we were going, but a lot turned out to see us off.
Dadda flew down to St Mawgan at a very moderate height and a very moderate speed. I don’t think he wanted to risk straining the crate’s engines. It was funny, starting out with the sun coming up over our shoulders.
‘We’ve gone west at last,’ said Kit. ‘So this is heaven?’
‘Looks more like Slough,’ said Paul.
‘Not the Slough of Despond?’ Kit was in a daft mood. He had nothing to do; navigationally, it was a trip round the bay. We all gawped like trippers at a countryside of mist and hill, cornfields turning pink in the sunrise, with reaping machines and hay carts left any-old-how overnight. A countryside we would never have to bomb; where early farmhands looked up at us once and pedalled on. Where we weren’t Terrorflieger.
Soon the pale blue of the Bristol Channel crawled over the horizon, to join the English Channel in sharpening the land to a pencil-point. Devon and Cornwall narrowed and narrowed; the sea gathered in as if, if not to welcome us, at least to look us over. The slice of atmosphere spilling into the Wimpey smelt cleanly of ocean and seaweed. We took a crafty look at St Mawgan from the air. It had the solid brick buildings of a permanent station; no more tents and Nissen huts. And even from up aloft you could see traces of RAF bullshit: whitewashed patterns of stone round a guardroom; what would be a flowerbed again in the spring. I turned up the RT, so Dadda could speak to the control-tower. Tower, a rich, fruity voice, finished up by saying, ‘You’ve chosen the right day to arrive. Mutton chops for lunch and the Saturday hop.’
Silence. We were all knocked silly by the idea of a regular Saturday hop. Saturday night was the Butcher’s favourite time for the Happy Valley, the Ruhr that is.
‘This place sounds like bloody Butlin’s,’ Kit blurted out.
‘Watch your tongue, Sergeant,’ said Dadda, more RAF than I’d ever heard him.
‘I heard that,’ said the fruity voice, not at all put out.
That Saturday hop was quite a thing. A sea of floral dresses; the smell of face powder and the swish of silk stockings. Not a bad band, either: three corporals and three LACs and a nice semi-professional touch, even if the music was a bit out of date; provincial. Most of us just sat and watched anyway, and breathed in the females, though Billy the Kid got involved with a red-haired WAAF with an amazing pair of Bristols. And Paul found a guy who owned a motorbike.
I just kept watching the faces. There were a lot of steady couples, staid, steady couples. Nobody living it up, kicking the place apart, or twitching. The aircrew looked hard-worked, but they had the ruddy look of fishermen or shepherds. Many were quite solid round the middle; if bombers make your guts screw up, the boredom of Coastal