that even Kit couldn’t have faked.
We finally reached the ground and crawled out. Dadda began belting hell out of the crate again, this time in the company of the ground-crew sergeant, and not sounding too pleased.
‘He can fly,’ said Matt judiciously. ‘But only Spitfires.’
‘Can’t you tell him this one’s got two engines?’ added Billy plaintively.
‘He’s mad,’ said Mad Paul. That, from Mad Paul, was approval.
‘I don’t know what he does to the enemy,’ said Kit, ‘but by God he frightens me.’ He lit a Woodbine and did his impersonation of an aircrew-recruiting poster, a foot nonchalantly on the Wimpey’s undercart as if he’d shot it himself.
I was sick again, over the undercart, and his foot. It was the only comment I could make. All those silly buggers’ eyes were shining, as if it was Christmas. Already they were calling the flight the Battle of Spalding.
I set my mind to finding out more about this nut of a pilot. I wanted to know who was killing me.
His name was Townsend. He was an Irishman, a Dubliner. Spoke that lovely clear English that only a certain type of Irishman speaks. When he said ‘the Castle’ he meant Dublin Castle. He was a Catholic; drove (like the devil) every Sunday morning to an ugly little yellow-brick Catholic church in Wisbech. It was the only thing he didn’t joke about. They said he’d spent two years at Maynooth, intending to be a priest and then a monk. But he’d left, saying it made the years too long. That’s why they started calling him Father Townsend, which got shortened to Dadda. At least, that was the story. Maybe they only called him Dadda because he was so much older than the rest of us. Thirty-five if he was a day.
After Maynooth, he seemed to have drifted. He taught English in some kind of left-wing free-school in Germany, till the Nazis closed it down. He’d seen Hitler before Hitler became famous; talked about him with neighbourly Irish spite as a busy, worried little man in a crumpled, belted raincoat. Somehow, that cut Hitler down to size for us. Later, Kit started the ‘Paddy O’Hitler’ craze that was unique to C-Charlie, though other crews tried copying us. Night-fighters became Paddy O’Hitler’s chickens. Bremen Docks, on fire, became Paddy O’Hitler’s rickyard.
‘Rickyard’s well alight tonight, Dadda!’
‘Maybe Paddy won’t be able to pay this quarter’s rent.’
‘Maybe the great landlord in the sky will evict him.’
‘Chicken dead astern, Dadda.’
‘Wring its bloody neck,’ said Dadda dreamily, as he fell down the sky in his famous corkscrew, and the Elsan broke loose again. Half-full this time, and everybody laughing like drains. Over a silly childish game. But op by op the game kept us laughing; kept us alive. And maybe Billy did wring a couple of chickens’ necks.
After he’d lost his German job, Dadda seemed to have drifted on round the English Catholic schools, teaching languages. Never staying long. Until the war came, and he learnt to fly. This was his third tour of ops. You only had to fly one. Most crews didn’t last half a tour before they got the chop. People said Dadda’d survived because he didn’t care if he lived or died; that was the way things went. People said that when the war was over, there’d still be one Wimpey flying over Europe in the dark, with Dadda at the controls, wondering where the war had gone to. They said he was mad as a hatter; flew like a lunatic.
They didn’t know him. Actually, he didn’t miss a trick. Every day we polished the perspex of our own turrets and windscreens, and he inspected them. ‘A fingerprint’s bigger than a night-fighter, acushla. We don’t want chickens hiding behind fingerprints. ’
On a raid, he always flew dead in the middle of the bomber stream. But at his own chosen height, which never appeared in Air Ministry Regulations. Three thousand eight hundred feet. That’s a very healthy height. The light flak’s lost its sting, and the heavy flak – the 88s and 102s – is unhappy and slow. And any night-fighter has got the ground and church steeples on hills to worry about, as well as you. Especially if it tries to attack from underneath, which is a favourite stinking little trick.
Besides, three thousand eight hundred feet gave Mad Paul the chance to have a crack with his front guns at the light-flak gunners and the searchlight-crews. I dare say it didn’t do Jerry much harm, but it did Paul