The Seventh Link Page 6

  There was a pause. The rest of the crew still seemed stunned into silence.

  Roger Wilks, the wireless operator said at last, ‘Well, it’s very good to see you, Don. We just can’t believe it, after all this time.’

  They were crowding round him now, slapping him on the back, joking, laughing. The whole crew reunited after more than fifty years. Quite a moment! The Colonel had known plenty of service camaraderie during his time in the army and attended a number of reunions, but he doubted if it compared with the fellow-feeling that must exist between men who had flown a tour together in an operational bomber in wartime.

  Geoffrey fetched more glasses, more brandy was poured, toasts drunk. Watching them, the Colonel caught occasional glimpses of the young airmen they had once been.

  The young-looking Jim Harper came over to speak to him.

  ‘We never thought we’d see Don again. All of us together again after all this time. It’s hard to take in. We look bit different, I dare say, but I don’t think we’ve changed much otherwise.’

  ‘You said you were the navigator?’

  ‘That’s me. I’d give Bill the course and he had to hope I’d got it right. It wasn’t easy, believe me. In those days navs had to do it all with a compass, a ruler and a pencil, and looking out of the window at the stars. Nothing like today. The lads have it easy now. It’s all done for them. I was always getting us lost at first, until I got the hang of things. Come to that, we all made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. Bill couldn’t do a decent landing, Roger couldn’t work the wireless for toffee, our tail-end Charlie, Ben, couldn’t have hit a rat in a barrel, Jack couldn’t drop the bombs on the target even if I found it for him. Bob, our flight engineer, was about the only one who knew what he was doing.’

  The Colonel took it all with a pinch of salt.

  ‘And Don?’

  ‘He was dead-eyed dick, so long as he wasn’t too hung-over. He’d had a lot of practice shooting kangaroos in the outback.’

  ‘Did I hear you taking my name in vain?’ The bomb aimer had appeared.

  The Colonel looked at him with interest. This was the man who had been lying prone in the forward compartment while the Lancaster had approached the target. He would have had a grandstand view of the hell of flak and flames below, the hideous spectacle of other bombers blown apart or spiralling downwards, and he was the one who had had to give the pilot clear and calm flying orders before he could release the bombs. Left, left. Right a bit. Steady … steady … steady. Bombs gone, skipper! It was hard to imagine it of this mild-mannered old gentleman.

  ‘That’s right, Jack. I was telling the Colonel what a useless lot we were at the start. You kept missing the target, remember?’

  The bomb aimer smiled slightly. ‘So did you, Jim, come to that. I didn’t have a hope. Terrible nav you were on those first ops. I don’t know how we even got there and back.’

  Nor did the Colonel, given the darkness, the atrocious weather, the rudimentary aids, not to mention the enemy flak and the fighters. The thought of those seven very young men – virtually boys – taking a huge bomber into battle over fiercely hostile enemy territory was sobering.

  ‘None of it can have been easy.’

  The bomb aimer had stopped smiling. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said quietly. ‘But we soon learned.’

  Later, he stood at the open window in the Blue Bedroom and looked up at the night sky and a brilliant full moon. A bomber’s moon. So-called because, in theory, it had made things easier for the bomber crews during the Second World War. They could see the ground well. By its bright light they could follow the course of rivers, shining like silver ribbons, pick out lakes and landmarks and targets. In practice, of course, the full moon could just as easily work against them as in their favour. The enemy on the ground could also see them and aim their guns the better, and so could the Luftwaffe night fighter pilots. A bomber silhouetted by the moon would have been easy meat. And more than fifty-five thousand men had died.

  FIVE

  ‘’Tis a fine morning, is it not, Colonel? We are blessed again by the sun’s rays.’

  Miss Warner was already seated at the table in the dining room when he came downstairs the next morning.

  She was dressed, as before, in the white mob cap, full skirts and tightly laced bodice and was working her way through a full English breakfast. The Tudors, he felt, would have approved. Didn’t they always start the day off heartily with roasted meats?

  ‘We are, indeed, Miss Warner.’

  ‘Methinks, ’twill last the day.’

  ‘I certainly hope so.’

  There was no sign of the crew members as yet and he was not altogether surprised. The reunion celebration in the kitchen had gone on for some time with Geoffrey opening another bottle of brandy. The Australian, especially, had put away a considerable amount.

  The Colonel hesitated over where to sit down. The far end of the table might seem rude but to put himself in the front line, close to Miss Warner, could invite a stream of Tudorese. He took the middle course of action and took a chair halfway down its length.

  ‘Didst sleep well, Colonel?’

  ‘Yes, very well, thank you. And you?’

  ‘I passed a most restful night. ’Tis my custom to rise early of a morning. To seize the day. Our little lives have so short a span. We must not waste a moment, must we?’

  ‘That’s very true, Miss Warner.’

  ‘Shall you visit the Hall today, Colonel? I wager you would find it of more than passing interest.’

  He said politely, ‘I’m sure I should, but my day is spoken for.’ Very soon, if he wasn’t careful, he would find himself talking mock Tudor back to her. ‘I’ve been invited to attend the RAF Buckby reunion this weekend.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Our host hast spoken of it. The gentlemen I encountered last night were once valiant comrades-in-arms, is that not so?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘We are not strangers to combat at the Hall, Colonel. There are skilled archers amongst our numbers. They can be seen drawing their long bows at targets in the grounds.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Last year we fought the Battle of Agincourt.’

  ‘Didn’t that rather pre-date Tudor times?’

  ‘We were mindful of that fact. ’Twas a celebration of the glorious victory of our noble King Henry V in the year of Our Lord fourteen hundred and fifteen. Many gentlemen took part, armed with bows and swords and carrying banners aloft. The French aristocrats were on horseback, the gallant English yeomen on foot. ’Twas a wondrous sight to behold.’

  ‘I hope nobody was hurt.’

  ‘Only a scratch or two. The English won, of course.’

  There had not been much ‘of course’ about it at the real Agincourt, the Colonel reflected. Any more than there had been in other wars and battles involving the English over the centuries. It had frequently been the nearest run thing, as Wellington had remarked about Waterloo. The same had applied to the Second World War, come to think of it. Triumph eventually snatched from the jaws of disaster. Modern wars seemed to follow a different pattern. They flared up intermittently, or dragged on for many years, or simply petered out unsatisfactorily unresolved.

  Miss Warden attacked a pork sausage. ‘The year before we did portray the Battle of Hastings.’

  ‘Not exactly a celebration?’

  ‘Yet most historic. And before Hastings ’twas Flodden Field.’

  Apparently, battles at the Hall could be refought at random and in no particular sequence.

  ‘And next year?’

  ‘Bosworth, methinks. ’Tis not yet quite decided.’

  There were plenty to choose from, he thought. Bannockburn, Crécy, Barnet, Lewes, Evesham, Tewkesbury, Towton … Fighting battles had long been bred into the island race. He was about to suggest one of them – possibly Lewes as a complete change of pace and place – when Geoffrey’s entrance saved the conversation from descending into farce.

  ‘Good morning, Hugh.
What would you like for breakfast? Heather will do eggs anyway you like them, and there’s the full English, if you want – fried eggs, bacon, sausages, black pudding, mushrooms, tomatoes.’

  ‘A boiled egg would suit me very well, thank you.’

  ‘How many minutes?’

  ‘About four?’

  ‘Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Coffee, please.’

  ‘There’s fruit and cereals on the sideboard, if you’d help yourself.’

  He was left alone with Miss Warner once more but fortunately getting his cornflakes provided a diversion and by the time he’d sat down again, six of the valiant comrades-in-arms had appeared. He watched fascinated to see how Miss Warner communicated with them from another century. She proved more than up to it, continuing blithely in her mock Tudor, and to their deep embarrassment.

  ‘Hugh wants a four-minute boiled egg and coffee,’ Geoffrey Cheetham told his wife. ‘And I just heard the others coming down.’

  ‘That’s good. Go and ask them what they’d like, would you? I need to get breakfast done and cleared away before the caterers arrive. They’ll want to take over the kitchen.’

  He said, ‘We’ll be out of your way for the morning while we do the airfield tour. Think you can manage without me?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Of course I can.’

  He paused at the door. ‘They’re splendid chaps, aren’t they? Salt of the earth.’

  ‘The one from Down Under is a bit too salty for me, but the others are very nice indeed.’

  She boiled the water for the Colonel’s egg and cut some bread for toast. In the beginning, the prospect of cooking breakfast for the B & B guests had given her sleepless nights but practice had made perfect and now it held no fears. She had everything timed to perfection and the Colonel’s boiled egg would be served just right. The Aussie would probably want steak with his, in which case he’d be out of luck. Though after the amount of brandy he’d drunk last night perhaps he wouldn’t feel like anything. Serve him right!

  Miss Warner had finished her breakfast.

  ‘I must away to my baking, gentlemen. I wish you all a merry day.’

  They rose to their feet and Roger Wilks, the wireless operator, who was nearest the door hurried to open it for her. Her sweeping curtsy to him was answered by a courtly bow. It was definitely catching, the Colonel decided.

  There was a collective sigh of relief as they resettled themselves. The mid-upper gunner had still not come down from his attic bedroom.

  ‘Don was always a lazy sod,’ Steed, the pilot, said. ‘We used to have to kick him out of bed for ops, didn’t we?’

  The tail gunner, Dickson nodded. ‘Maybe we should do that again. No point missing things when he’s come all this way.’

  ‘Speaking of missing things,’ Davies, the bomb aimer said. ‘Do you remember when that 109 nearly got us because old Don was having some shut-eye?’

  ‘Dozy bastard!’

  They were joking, of course. Their mid-upper gunner must have pulled his weight or they would never have survived. Falling asleep at the switch would never have been tolerated.

  They were at the toast and marmalade stage when the Australian finally came downstairs. He was unshaven and his clothes looked as though he had slept in them. Not surprising if he had, considering the combined effect of brandy and jet lag. But his appetite seemed in good order – good enough to see off the big fry-up set before him and to drink several cups of tea.

  He said, ‘I hear you’re coming with us on the coach tour, Colonel. Doesn’t sound like there’s going to be much left to see, does it? Doesn’t surprise me. Most people seem to want to forget what we did. They’d sooner pretend it didn’t happen. They feel squeamish about us dropping all those bombs on the Jerries. The fact is we didn’t drop nearly enough.’

  The Colonel remembered the post-war photographs he had seen of the devastation in German cities.

  ‘I’d say Bomber Command did a pretty thorough job.’

  ‘I was talking about us, Colonel. This crew sitting round this table. We could have killed a whole lot more Krauts, if we’d wanted to.’

  The pilot said, ‘You always did talk rubbish, Don.’

  ‘But it’s the truth, Bill, isn’t it? And we all know it, don’t we? The Colonel doesn’t, though.’

  ‘Put a sock in it, Don. That’s enough.’

  The Australian shrugged. He drained his cup of tea. ‘If you say so. If that’s orders. You’re the skipper.’

  The coach arrived to take them on the tour of the airfield. It was already almost full of other former Bomber Command crew attending the reunion – old men, a few of them with their wives and one with his young grandson. The Colonel found himself sitting beside Roger Wilks, the crew’s wireless operator. He was a widower, like himself, and his wife had been dead for nearly fifteen years. He was still trying to get used to living on his own, he said.

  The Colonel could sympathize.

  ‘Have you been to other reunions?’

  ‘I used to go to them. I’m getting too old for it now. This’ll be my last one. I was twenty when I started on the Lancasters, you know. I’d left school at fifteen and I’d been working in a factory near my home town in Yorkshire. They made glass bottles and jars. Not what you’d call very exciting. When the war started, I volunteered for the RAF and asked to train as a fighter pilot. Of course, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to do that but I wasn’t good enough to be any sort of pilot, so, in the end, I settled for being a WOP/AG on bombers.’

  ‘It strikes me that all members of a bomber crew were equally important.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I was jack-of-all-trades, to tell the truth. Apart from operating the wireless, I was in charge of the Very pistol so I had to memorize the right colours of the day and remember to switch on the Identification Friend or Foe going out and coming home – that’s if we didn’t want to get shot down by our own side.’

  ‘Quite a responsibility.’

  ‘Well, some of our ack-ack lads were trigger-happy, I can tell you. It didn’t do to give them an excuse. That wasn’t all I had to worry about, though. I was lookout in the astrodome and I was the one who got sent to check for hang-ups in the bomb bay and inspect the flare chute to see the photo-flash had gone all right. And I had to wind the trailing aerial in and out by hand which meant crawling on my stomach to get to it. And I was expected to know how the intercom system worked and help Jim, our navigator, with the Gee fixes. I also had to learn how to give first aid, as well as look after the carrier pigeon.’

  He had forgotten that the RAF used pigeons for sending messages back. It seemed incredible now, given modern means of instant communication. But pigeons had been used routinely during the Second World War and other wars before; some of them, he thought, had even earned medals and, no doubt, thoroughly deserved them.

  ‘You must have been kept very busy.’

  ‘I was. And I did six weeks at gunnery school as part of my training, so I was a gunner too. WOP/AGs they called us, officially. General dogsbody would have been more like it.’

  There was a faint trace of grievance, still lingering after more than fifty years.

  The coach took them on to the airfield through the original main entrance about a mile down the road from The Grange. They drove round the perimeter track towards the former administrative site where the remains of buildings could be seen, shrouded in brambles and nettles and weeds. Roger Wilks peered out of the window.

  ‘It’s hard to tell what’s what any more … it all looks so different. I can’t recognize anything.’

  Further on, the driver stopped the coach and they got out. Men who would once have sprung easily from the backs of RAF trucks, now descended steps slowly and stiffly, grasping the handrail. Several of them had walking sticks. Geoffrey had taken on the job of guide and led the way along a path that had been cleared through briars and nettles towards a dilapidated Nissen hut.

  The group stopped outside double doors. The
wireless operator said doubtfully, ‘I think this used to be the crew’s briefing room, but I’m not sure.’

  They went inside and stood in silence. It was a large rectangular room in a sad state of decay. Brambles groped through broken windows, holes gaped in the corrugated iron roof and weeds sprouted up from the concrete floor. But there were still traces of its former purpose: a dais at the far end with a large blank wall behind it, electric lighting wires trailing from the ceiling, blackout fittings at the windows, stove pipe outlets.

  The Colonel had seen enough photographs and old films to picture the scene. There would have been rows of tables and chairs with a gangway down the centre, a target map on the wall behind the dais. At briefings the room would have been crowded with crews, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the atmosphere a mixture of high tension and gallows humour. Can I have your egg if you don’t come back? The humour was essential, of course. It dispelled fear. Fear was unthinkable. Unadmissable. Nobody actually died on ops. They went for a burton, bought it, got the chop, had their chips, were written off. Anything but killed.

  After a while, the reunion group began to move about the room. Bill Steed came over to the Colonel.

  ‘This certainly brings back a few memories.’ He pointed to a spot close to the dais. ‘Our crew always sat there. Same table, same chairs every time. Two rows back. The room was kept locked all day with a curtain over the map on that end wall there and the windows blacked out, so nobody could see that night’s target. We’d bike over early and sit waiting for the Station CO and his lot to arrive. It was a nerve-racking wait, I can tell you. You never knew if it was going to be an easy ice cream op to Italy or a real bastard. When the CO finally turned up they whipped away the curtain and showed you the red tape pinned across the map. Then you knew what you were in for. Essen, Cologne, Stuttgart, Hamburg – they were always bad ones but Berlin was the worst, we thought. The Big City, we used to call it. Old Yellowstripe. More than a thousand miles there and back and better defended than any of them. Radar, decoy targets, and flak thick enough to get out and walk on. And if it wasn’t the flak, we’d have swarms of Jerry night fighters. The bastards would go for our blind spot under the fuselage.’