he didn’t have a left hand any more, that his charred fingers had broken off on the control-column. Three times, in between the flames catching him, he gave his name, rank and number, clear as clear.
‘73794 Leutnant Gehlen, Dieter Ernst.’
Once he cried, ‘My eyes, my eyes!’
And all the time, in the background, Blackham’s lot were laughing. (I heard afterwards that Dadda told me three times to turn down the intercom, and I never even heard him.)
He blew up at last, well below us and about a mile behind. Long trails of pink and white burning stuff shot in every direction, as if someone had set off a bundle of Guy Fawkes rockets. Then the sky was black, till the moon returned to our senses.
‘Get that intercom turned down, Gary. I’m tired of telling half Germany where I am.’
‘Yes, Dadda.’ We had been flying three minutes on a straight course, sending out radio-signals clear as lighthouse beams. We were dead. Dadda went into the steepest dive I have even been in. We fell like a stone. I thought we would never pull out; I thought we were mortally hit, though I hadn’t heard a sound.
We came home at zero feet, and, until we cleared the Belgian coast, on petrol-guzzling full boost. Zero feet with Dadda meant just that; I saw at least three church steeples flick by overhead. It felt better that way. When you’re high up, you feel big as a haystack and slow as a cow. At zero feet, you feel powerful, like a crazy, souped-up racing car. We were almost part of the ground. Smells of the earth wafted through the fuselage for a second, and were gone. You always get your share of the local atmosphere in a Wimpey. And the smells were a sort of sad comfort; the sharp tang as Dadda clipped the tips of a pine forest, then the rich smell of a pig farm. Once, enough to make you cry, the safe, warm smell from an early-working Belgian bakery. We saw no more fighters; none saw us. Perhaps they were all chasing Blackham. Maybe there was still some justice in the world, ha-ha. Two miles beyond the coast, a flak-ship opened up on us with tracer; red and green balls, very pretty, very slow-curving, then accelerating alarmingly. Here’s ours, I thought. Here we go to join Gehlen at the gates of hell. But they’d misjudged our range or speed. The tracers passed miles behind us.
When we landed at Lower Oadby, S-Sugar was already standing in her dispersal-pen. And the debriefing hut was swamped with the noise of Blackham’s lot. You always get a horrible tot of RAF rum at debriefing; it smelt and sounded as if Blackham’s lot had joined the rum queue several times each. They had simply flown home, without taking any evasive action. Four times they’d been attacked by fighters, but, according to Blackham, they’d been ‘Waiting for the little bastards, just waiting for them.’ They were claiming two more kills, and were giving the little WAAF who was debriefing them a hell of a time.
‘Here’s a lovely lad’ll confirm one,’ said Blackham, grabbing both my cheeks between his fingers and thumbs. ‘He gave it to me, didn’t you, me lovely lad? Ah was going to nail thee, but now us is quits. When tha tell the young lady Ah roasted one o’ them bastards over a slow fire.’ I was sick all down his flying-jacket; and I was never less sorry about anything in my life. I blundered out of the debriefing hut; the light and heat and the noise were like some Viking feast . . . I’d heard that all Yorkshire tykes were Vikings in the beginning.
Dawn was just starting to break; the runways, the parked Wimpeys were like pencil-scrawls on a lavatory wall; meaningless garbage. How ungrateful can you get? I thought. Dadda’s brought us home by a miracle, and I’m not even glad. Because tomorrow night, or the next, or the next, we shall be going back to do it all over again. Anyway, I wasn’t home on the airfield; I was still sitting in that burning cockpit with Gehlen. He had sounded about our age . . . I was back with Gehlen, over and over and over again. Life had stopped with Gehlen, like a faulty gramophone record that keeps the needle jumping back to the same place and repeating the same tune. Bugger the Germans and the British. There were just those