Tuesday's War, page 13
‘Quelch isn’t a Jewish name.’
‘No. It’s not mine either. I started out as Lipstein, but the RAF decided to rename me in case I was captured. The Kraut wouldn’t be too tasty about an RAF pilot named Lipstein. I was asked what name I wanted, and all that came into my mind was Billy Bunter stories.’
‘What happened next?’
‘Some blighter worked out that I was likely to live longer in prison than out here flying. That offended their sense of natural justice so they told me to go back to flying, only as a sergeant. Butch must have had a particularly bloody week, and been getting short of pilots again. I suppose a thieving sergeant pilot is better than no pilot at all.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
We were standing close together at the gate. He said casually, as if he was asking me the time, ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a kiss?’
I put a yard between us before saying, ‘Don’t be bloody daft!’
‘No harm done though?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘course not. I can see why you think the Kraut wouldn’t be too keen on you though. Don’t get caught, will you?’
He sounded pensive for the first time. ‘Would that be don’t get caught for being a Jew, or for being a queer or for being a thief?’
I laughed because I didn’t know what else to say. ‘It couldn’t be much worse for you, could it?’
‘Oh, it could. I might have been a Catholic.’
Time to head for home, little Charlie.
In the billet Pete was lying on his bunk with only the light near the stove on. He was looking at the ceiling and smoking. It was smooch time on the radio: that show with Anne Shelton and Jo Stafford. Occasionally they’d take a break, and play Dinah Shore. Pete was very fond of that show, and would try to get alongside a radio each week for it. There was a new uniform draped decorously over the end of my bed. There was one at the end of each bed.
Pete waved at me with his cigarette, and between songs said, ‘You said you needed a new issue. They cost me nothing.’ As if that was that.
I knew that it would be a perfect fit. I had wondered what was in the boxes he’d stacked up a couple of days earlier.
‘Where were you?’ he said later, when he decided he wanted to talk.
‘I left them in that pub at Caxton. I didn’t fancy it. I walked back along the Drift. It’s a great night. I met Quelch.’
‘He try to touch you up?’
‘No. How did you know about that?’
‘We have them in Poland also. He got anything for sale?’
‘Three chickens.’
‘Small fry,’ said Piotr; he turned away from me and picked up a well-thumbed movie magazine which had pictures of girls in it.
‘Pete . . . you and Grace?’
He kept his back to me, but his quiet return of serve had iron in it; ‘No. Never.’
‘Don’t you like her?’
He turned to face me again. ‘Sure, Charlie, I like her a lot. We all like her a lot.’
I spat out what was worrying me. ‘So you don’t mind that everyone has had her but you?’
‘No, I don’t mind. You must understand that if you offered me your tea mug to drink from, I would wash it clean first. It’s the same thing.’
There was an answer in there somewhere, to a question that had been worrying me. It was an odd answer, because I’ve told you before that Pete had shagged his way from Bawne to Bedford and back, whilst none of us got much of a look in. I didn’t let him off the hook.
‘At first I wasn’t sure that I liked her. I wondered what she would do to the crew.’
‘She’s not a chop lady, Charlie.’
Chop ladies were the unlucky ones: every airman they went with got the chop soon after. You could spot them at parties dancing with each other; no one would go near them once the word got round.
I told him,‘I know that. But I suppose it would be a mistake to get too fond of her?’
‘How old are you, Charlie?’
‘You know – twenty. Why?’
‘Then bloddy act it. First I thought she was anybody’s. Then I know I seen her type before: she’s nobody’s. If you fall for her it won’t last; sometime you’ll get over it.’
He went back to his magazine. Ten minutes later he looked up and grinned. ‘And don’t sulk when an old man tells you the truth.’
I had learned early on with Tuesday’s people that there was little point in going to sleep with a couple of them adrift. You could doze, and get a bit of a rest that way, but they’d be sure to wake you on their way in; besides, I had to keep half an ear open for sniggers, and pissing in the fire bucket, didn’t I? So I dozed. They weren’t that late, but late enough to have to come in through the private gate. I didn’t hear the Indian; it must have still been out the back of the Caxton pub. Marty came and sat at the edge of the bed. He had a graze across one cheek but I didn’t ask. Instead I asked him, ‘What was your land girl like?’
‘Persuadable. Anna’s an American who got caught over here at the start of the war. Her name is Anna Etta-something, like Plaice, or Cod. She comes from a farm in Missouri, so she’s probably a bit of a find for the estate. She says that Etta Plaice is her mother’s name: mother was once a schoolteacher, and the mistress of a famous American outlaw. She says that the outlaw has settled over here, now runs a perfectly respectable garage business near Godalming, and supports the war effort.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘Probably.’ Probably was probably our second favourite word. It was as close to a sure thing as you got in our world.
Marty had remembered what he had come over to tell me in the first place. He said, ‘You did know that the radio you’re fiddling with up at Crifton came from the B-17 that made such a god-awful hole in Old Man Baker’s Long Ride?’
‘Yes, he told me that. Most of the radio shack was bounced clear of the wreck.’ I raised myself on my elbows, fully half awake now.
‘It was smashed to bits when it hit. Some bits burned and some didn’t. The tail section with the rear gunner was reasonably intact, but it had compacted up into the main frame. They heard him screaming above the fire for several minutes.’
‘Thank you for that, Marty.’ I was thinking of how long it would have taken anyone to reach the wreck anyway. Five minutes? Seven? Poor sod. ‘Did anybody get out?’
Marty shook his head slowly, as if reporting a national tragedy. ‘No: not a chance. Grace’s boyfriend was the co-pilot.’
‘I didn’t know that. Nobody said.’
‘Anna guesses that they were showing off. You know the way the Long Ride climbs away from the house? It’s steeper than it looks. They must have dived into it and not left enough space to get out again. Boomph.’
‘I just told you. I didn’t know.’
‘That’s why I said you were such a tit about phoning Thurleigh from the Hall. I’m surprised the Yanks will even talk to you. I’m surprised that Grace will even talk to you.’
‘Grace is fairer than that.’
Marty smiled a distant smile. ‘Yes . . . she is. You’re a lucky man.’
I thought, What the hell do you mean by that? but didn’t ask. What I asked was,‘Where is she anyway?’
‘She went back to the Hall on the bike; she’s going north tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t know she could ride.’
‘She can’t, but it can’t be too different from flying – if you let go of the steering it falls over. I had to start it for her from the pillion, and then hop off. I grazed my face on the ground.’ At least he hadn’t been in a fight.
‘How’s she going to stop when she gets home?’
‘She says that she’s going to go very slowly and point it at something. She’s so drunk she could fall off the Eiffel Tower without breaking anything.’ Marty stood up. A little unsteady himself.
‘I walked back along the Drift. I met Quelch,’ I told him.
‘He touch you up?’
‘No. That’s what Pete asked. How come I’m the last one to know that?’
‘Perhaps you’re the last one he’s asked,’ said Marty, and walked away.
Bad Pyrmont
The following evening we toured Bad Pyrmont, which was a neat place to be found on the way to Berlin. I don’t know what Bad Pyrmont had done to get a bad name, but there were 400 of us over it that night. There had been no special briefing for any of us, so if there was any particular purpose to the event we didn’t know of it. Sure, they gave us the usual old guff about factories producing elastic bands which held the engines of FW German fighter planes together, but nobody believed that any longer. Anyway, as the Toff pointed out, FWs were mainly day fighters, they rarely bothered us; so all we were doing was making things easier for the Yanks, who bombed in daylight. When was somebody going to make things easier for us?
Fiver had got the QL crew bus, which was what we were comfortable in, and in the back I asked Piotr what there was at Bad Pyrmont worth going there for. He was pretty good at European geography, having come from around there somewhere.
‘I believe they got a railway station,’ he said.
‘That’s my primary tonight,’ Marty said.
‘There’s got to be something else.’
‘I believe they got a duck pond. A very good duck pond in the middle of a park.’
Conners said, ‘Bombing ducks would be against the Geneva Convention. We haven’t declared war on ducks yet.’
‘Is all right,’ from Pete, ‘they are Nazi ducks. Party members.’
‘That’s all right then.’
‘It may be Bad Pyrmont at the moment,’ Fergal told us, ‘but it’s going to be a fucking sight worse in the morning.’ Fergal didn’t often swear.
You can see we felt all right about taking Tuesday to Bad Pyrmont.
At Tuesday’s dispersal Grease had a word with Chief Bryan, and I didn’t butt in because I had no specific worries about her this time. Marty had definitely started to become odd about his bombs. He kissed his hand, and laid it on each bomb as he counted, and signed for them. Only in Britain would they make you sign for bombs before you took them to the enemy. What would happen if we dumped them somewhere? Would they dock their cost from our pay? Marty could count to nine, so that was all right – we had a 4,000-pound cookie and eight smaller blast bombs. No incendiaries that night, which was good. It was good, because if I was going to kill any civilian non-com types I wanted to blow them to bits, not roast them.
I think Marty read my mind, because when he ducked back out from the open bomb bay he grinned, and said, ‘Wonder how many kids I’ll kill with these tonight?’ I noticed the Toff wince.
Piotr turned away from us, dropped his cigarette on the tarmac, and stood on it. Fergal was out of earshot doing his walk-round checks – he had more than forty to complete before we flew. I looked back at the QL and saw Fiver’s pale face behind the screen: too far away to see whether she smiled.
Minutes later we had hauled up inside Tuesday, and were subconsciously registering the litany of checks between Grease and Fergal.
Their checklist was like a litany repeated night after night, flight after flight. It came out like:
‘Ground/Flight Switch?’ – ‘ON GROUND’
‘Throttles?’ – ‘SET’
‘Pitch?’ – ‘FULLY FINE’
‘Slow running?’ – ‘IDLE CUT OFF’
‘Supercharger?’ – ‘M GEAR – LIGHTS OUT’
‘Air intake?’ – ‘COLD’
‘Rad shutters?’ – ‘AUTO’
‘Number two tank?’ – ‘SELECTED – BOOSTER PUMP ON’
‘Master fuel cocks?’ – ‘ON’
‘Ignition?’ – ‘ON’
‘Contact’
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.
You had your own job to do, of course. Bawne had changed its call sign to Blackbirder, which was something I had to remember, but was forbidden to write down. I’ve always had problems in the short-term memory department. Eventually I wrote it on a piece of rice paper sliced from the code pad, and tucked it inside my glove, vowing to make a last supper of it on the way down, if we copped it.
After I had done my business, while Tuesday was still climbing, and before I knew Grease would order me up to the dome, I moved up to his office like the last trip, and stood behind his seat. I touched his shoulder to let him know I was there. He didn’t look up; just nodded. In front of us, and about one hundred feet above us, a lonely Lanc dropped away to port and turned back for home. I scanned it for its codes as it came back past us, and clicked the intercom.
‘That was something, something, kilo, Skip.’
Grease clicked back. ‘If it’s the Boss, then he’s showing some bloody sense at last.’ There was a short pause, then he clicked again. ‘I can see searchlights.’
‘Enemy coast ahead, Skip. Four minutes,’ Conners said.
Grease again. ‘Take your places everyone. Overture and beginners, please. Watch the skies, gentlemen.’
For the first time I asked myself, why are we doing this?
We bombed on a group of wizard TIs put down by the Pathfinder leader. Marty said we were bang on for the station and a marshalling yard, but I still harboured suspicions that he was going for the orphanage and the duck pond. I was in the dome for the whole of the run in. I saw two bombers turn into roman candles and glide steeply out of the night sky streaming flame like torches, and another blow up with a great silent flash that shook Tuesday like a terrier shakes a rat.
I heard someone muttering ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck’ and realized that it was Grease cursing slowly under his breath, counting down the seconds until we released our bombs. As soon as Tuesday leapt like a salmon Grease stopped muttering. At that I thought, incongruously, Out on you, owls! Nothing but songs of death? – a line from Richard III, the last book I had studied at school.
I think that I told you that unlike most bomber pilots, Grease reacted differently each time we bombed a target – he was never predictable. I rather approved of this: if he was unpredictable to me, then he was even more so to the radar-led flak and searchlights down there. This time he caught Tuesday at the top of her bounce, turned her on her side, and made a flat fast turn to starboard without losing much height. I heard Conroy cursing as his maps and equipment slid into his lap, then Pete’s ‘Corkscrew port’, and his guns begin to chatter, followed by the Toff’s.
The move from starboard turn to port corkscrew nearly tore my head off. Grease allowed it two complete turns and then reversed them. I held on and shut my eyes briefly. When I opened them again we were flying in the dark, and I saw an angular mid-winged twin – certainly Mr Kraut – flying alongside on the right, and slightly below us: it was already burning inside, and in the cockpit you could see the crew struggling with their straps. A twin stream of machine-gun bullets reached out for it from behind; one of the figures stopped moving, and the flames burst out of the fuselage around the wing roots. The machine-gun fire hadn’t come from Tuesday, it was from the front turret of another Lanc which had swarmed in behind it for the kill. The night fighter fell away, trailing fire like one of the stricken Lancasters I had seen minutes before, turning on its back as it fell, back towards the fires of Bad Pyrmont.
‘Fuck-ing Henry,’ said the Toff. It was a phrase he only used when he was moved.
‘Rear gunner, Skip,’ Piotr said.
Grease responded, ‘Yeah, Pete,’ and you could hear over the intercom his deep rasping breaths.
‘I think that Lanc was with us through the turns Skipper.’
‘OK, Pete.’
‘I think it is Quelch. He’s flying the focking thing like a fighter. I didn’t lay a bullet on that 88.’
The Toff said, ‘Toff, Skipper – neither did I.’
‘Thank you, Toff. Keep your eyes open everyone. We’re not out of it yet.’
Conroy had waited for a natural pause, and said, ‘Course change in ten Skipper.’
‘Thank you, Nav. When you’re ready.’
There he went again. Sounding like a bloody officer. I don’t know why, but his lonely chant of ‘keep your eyes open everyone’ had begun to irritate me.
On the way back Marty broke into the night and said, ‘I think I get it.’
‘What’s that Marty?’ asked Grease.
‘It’s Quelch. I know why he’s always behind us.’
‘Why’s that Marty?’
‘If he can’t get up our arses on the ground, then he’s doing it up here in a fucking Lanc.’
‘Very funny, Marty. Now, keep your eyes open: we aren’t home yet.’
Conners always knew when to say it. ‘Dutch coast coming up in five Skip. Course change in fifteen.’
‘Thank you, Nav. When you’re ready.’
We flew over Manston on the trip north and the Toff remembered that he still had the Manston MO’s walking stick. There was an old fire burning on the ground just beyond the airfield.
Grease offered Quelch the first shot at the runway as we landed, in a thick drizzle that pulled down vis to about sixty yards, and made the concrete greasy. Quelch went in rather heavily, and Grease, determined not to repeat Q’s mistake, made one of the worst landings of his life: too fast by far. We were on the deck as we reached the hump in the middle of the runway, but were still travelling so fast that I thought we’d become airborne again. Anyway, Grease held her down. We’d launched nine aircraft for Bad Pyrmont. There was Tuesday, Quelch and the Boss, three other all-sergeant crews, one hybrid, and two all-officer crews. One of the sergeant crews had bought it over the target. The hybrid was down, so were the other two sergeant crews. So were we, and so was Quelch. The officers were not back yet, but we didn’t know them anyway. The important question was where was the bloody Boss?
We debriefed with Harriet. The Toff asked her if he could debrief her one day, which earned him an old-fashioned look from the Pole, which was interesting. We confirmed Quelch’s kill, and Piotr even used the same phrase he used at the time.
‘He flew his Lancaster like a focking fighter plane.’
Maybe they’d get gongs out of it. Afterwards Grease, the Toff and Quelch went off from us, and talked in a corner. Then Grease came back to us and said, ‘It was the Old Man we saw turning back; he’d lost all his boost and just couldn’t stay up with us. He’d been falling back along the stream for half an hour.’
