Bomber, page 9
A sign was painted – RAF Station Warley Fen – and erected at the entrance. The wooden shed there was painted red and white and adorned with a notice: ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT HERE. In no time at all it seemed as though the village had always known the bustle of one thousand and eighty-three noisy airmen: bicycles were stacked outside the Bell every evening and Mrs Jenkins had had to write NO CIGARETTES on her window in whitewash in order to save a few smokes for her regulars. There were girl airmen too, to the villagers’ dismay. They flaunted painted lips and waved hair and worked as hard as the men. Sometimes they were heard to swear as hard as the men, too. They set an awesome example to the village girls. Some said the whole aerodrome was a ‘black Satan’s nest’ and hurried past it after dark, especially if the roar of aircraft was rattling the village windowpanes like a thousand furies.
Dispersed all round the aerodrome were the Squadron’s bombers sitting on their tarmac circles. The six-foot-high fence that surrounded the airfield was little more than a boundary mark, for human logic had torn great holes in it where it had blocked the paths that led from the dispersals to the Bell. Even the armed sentries who stood all night at the main gate would, their duty finished, wander off through gaps in the fence to save themselves a hundred extra yards walk along the perimeter track. It was through one of these gaps that the Bedford lorry bumped and caused them all to lose their balance. Digby and Battersby hit their heads against the metal uprights. ‘Hold on!’ shouted Flight Lieutenant Sweet from his seat in the cab.
‘Now he tells us,’ said Digby as the lorry pulled up in front of B Flight offices. The tailflap crashed open and Sweet took Mrs Lambert by the waist and floated her down in a movement that would have done credit to the Sadlers Wells ballet company. Still holding her by the waist, Sweet gave her a decorous kiss. ‘Droit du Seigneur, Lambert,’ he called. ‘The driver will take you to the Ops Block, Mrs Lambert; it looks like there’s something on for us. It’s a good thing that I decided to look in here first.’
The Lancaster bombers were alive with airmen. Engine mechanics, riggers, electricians, instrument fitters and radio mechanics swarmed all over the great four-motor aircraft. The newcomers automatically looked across to the north corner of the airfield. There a group of hillocks looked like prehistoric burial mounds with a concrete entrance to each. It was all surrounded with blast walls and laced with pulleys and tackle. Inside that was the bomb store. Around it were queues of bomb-trains. Armourers bent low over fuses and fins, and patted the bombs into place on the trolleys. There were general purpose bombs and high-capacity bombs and target indicators and canisters packed with ninety shiny 4-lb incendiaries. No one was painting ‘Hello Hitler’ on them; that was something the Press photographers did. For armourers there was nothing humorous about a bomb.
‘Looks like we’re on the battle order, chaps,’ said Sweet. ‘There’s a bit of luck. I’ll enjoy putting some HE amongst the squareheads.’
‘Bombs or mines?’ said Digby.
‘Can’t see,’ said Cohen.
The Flight offices were a complex of tin huts which rattled as one by one the engines were tested up to full revs. The Sergeant clerk saluted as Sweet entered the shabby little room marked B Flight Office. Eric, the airman clerk, stopped typing and stood up at attention. It was a dismal place. There were two filing boxes, two tables and two chairs. In the corner there was a sink with chipped railway cups and a brown metal teapot upside down to drain. A notice board on the wall was crammed with ancient announcements and memos. The blackboard was marked to show the serviceability of B Flight’s Lancasters. Above it Sweet had had the lettering bod write ‘B Flight Bombs Best’ in Saxon lettering. There was a dirty smudge under it where another opinion on the subject had been clumsily erased.
‘Good morning Percy, good morning Eric,’ said Sweet. ‘Are we on?’
‘Yes, sir; maximum effort,’ said the Sergeant.
‘I hear you’re making a book on the Squadron cricket match on Saturday, Eric. Put me down for five bob.’
‘On us, sir?’ said Eric.
‘You cheeky sod,’ said Sweet. ‘Aren’t I the best batsman in the Group?’
‘That’s it, sir.’ Sweet smiled appreciatively and patted Eric’s shoulder.
Sweet picked up a tin of pennies and shook it. A hand-lettered label said ‘Village Children’s Xmas Party’. Last year and the one before that, the clerk Eric Sedge and LAC Gilbert, the Squadron artist, had arranged it, but this year Sweet had put the full force of his persuasive personality behind it. Smilingly he demanded contributions from all ranks and insisted that any raffles or sweepstakes held among the lads of B Flight must pay ten per cent ‘tax’ to the Christmas party.
‘How much more since Friday, Eric?’ Sweet rattled the tin again.
‘A few pennies, sir.’
‘Get the names in the book?’
‘I don’t put down less than sixpence.’
‘Get them all in the book, Eric. It’s only fair. Then at Christmas we’ll see which section has contributed most.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And put the teapot on, Eric.’ Sweet walked through the door marked ‘B Flight Commander’. It was very hot inside and a wasp was buzzing hysterically. Sweet hit the wasp with a rolled-up copy of Picture Post and then opened the window. He scooped up the wasp and put it outside. He leaned out far enough to see Lambert talking to his wife. Sweet inhaled the perfume of freshly cut grass and looked long enough at two airmen on fatigues for them to go back to work. Sweet sat down at his desk. Over it a poster with the slogan ‘Bread is a munition of war, don’t waste it’ had a Johnny Walker label obscuring the first word. The office was equipped from many sources. There were pub ashtrays, a cinema seat, a Victorian wardrobe containing Sweet’s working uniform and some spare flying kit. There were also a small stove with a home-made chimney, a threadbare piece of antique carpet and a suitcase full of gramophone records (including a course in spoken German). Through the window were the Lancasters he commanded, standing on the skyline like a frieze.
Sweet’s own plane was S for Sugar, although by now he had persuaded almost everyone on the Squadron to call it S Sweet. It was the newest aeroplane on B Flight. Its Perspex was bright and clear and its interior shiny bright. It had one bomb painted on its nose.
Lambert’s aeroplane – O Orange – on the other hand, was an ancient machine, with line after line of yellow bombs totalling sixty-two. From outside it looked the same as the other bombers, covered for the most part in black matt paint with dull green and brown on the upper surfaces. But if you went inside and looked at the bright alloy formers in its nose and wondered why the port side of the interior had dulled and tarnished while the starboard interior was gleaming fresh silver metal, you might guess that it had not escaped unharmed from its sixty-two trips. She had been back to Servicing Flight for major surgery. She’d had a new tail section, the port flaps were new, and the nose and port wing had several riveted plates where flak had holed her. Bomb-doors were the most vulnerable part and this plane had used up eight of those.
When Lambert’s crew had first got her fifteen trips ago they had looked with silent awe upon the battle-scarred machine until Micky Murphy the Flight Engineer said, ‘A creaking door hangs the longest.’ Digby christened her ‘Creaking Door’. The machine seemed to revel in the name and although she flew like a bird, the tail section did creak a little, especially over the target. Or so swore Flight Sergeant Digby.
If one hadn’t known what a cynical unimaginative type Digby was, it would be easy to accuse him of sentimentality about Creaking Door. It had cost him many pints of beer to hear its life story from Flight Sergeant Worthington. For bombers belonged to the ground crew; aircrew only borrowed them.
Creaking Door was one of the very first Lancasters ever built. The factory was producing a disastrous two-motor aeroplane and as an emergency measure the designers asked if they could try putting two extra motors on it. The Air Ministry experts said no, the factory ignored them and begged, borrowed and stole bits and pieces in order to try it anyway.
‘That’s how the best bombing plane of the war was designed. What a typical pommy fiasco.’
‘I told my father that it was a fine example of British engineering genius,’ said Battersby.
‘An accident, sport. But she’s a beaut, a real vintage beaut.’
‘What remarkable luck,’ said Binty Jones, the mid-upper gunner, looking up from his comic book. ‘We’ll sell her to one of those museum places when we have finished with the clapped-out old wreck.’
‘Money, that’s all you dills think about,’ said Digby. ‘I’m talking about art. I’m talking about history. Yes, planes like this will be in museums when the war is over, preserved as a masterpiece of twentieth-century taste and culture and beauty.’
‘We all will,’ said Lambert.
‘I should have known better than trying to talk seriously to you mob,’ said Digby.
Next in line along the dispersal was L Love, which was having a new name and symbol painted to surmount the fifteen yellow bombs on its nose: ‘Joe for King’ was now its name. Sergeant Tommy Carter flew ‘Joe for King’. He was a handsome red-haired orphan from Newcastle. After the orphanage he’d become a messenger boy and then a Newcastle policeman until his inspector found him reading Das Kapital.
‘What the devil are you doing with that damned rubbish, Constable Carter?’
‘It’s for my evening classes, sir. I’ve got Mein Kampf here in my other pocket.’
‘Don’t bring that poison into my police station, Constable. Do you understand?’
‘I do, Inspector.’
Two months later he joined the RAF. He had a huge ginger moustache that had originated as a disguise for a scarred lip. He’d encouraged it into the slightly clownish handlebar shape that was fashionable among many aircrew. Tommy Carter thought the RAF was the most marvellous thing that had happened to him, and Joe for King, he said, was the finest Lancaster ever manufactured. The machine was fifteen trips old; Tommy’s crew had done eight of those with the exception of Collins. He was their bomb aimer. Only survivor of a crash landing in February, he’d completed twenty-nine trips. Tonight would be his last before going for a rest.
The next Lancaster bomber was Z Zebra. It was almost out of sight behind the ash trees of The Warrens, where even in daylight wild rabbits ran across the tarmac pans. Under the shade of Zebra’s wingtips, in the damp-smelling black soil, there were now puff-ball mushrooms for frying and in the autumn delicious blewits in fairy rings and red fly agaric that men said could kill.
‘The Volkswagen’, they called Z Zebra. Its skipper was Pilot Officer Cornelius Fleming; newly commissioned, with three hundred and fifty flying hours at training schools, he was a soft-spoken introvert from York, an ex-student of medicine. He had done his elementary flying training in Alberta. Canada’s bright lights and informality were a startling change after blacked-out wartime Britain, and the ease with which he’d got lost flying over the prairie had been a fearful lesson in its dimensions. Three times a week he wrote to Tracy Rybakowski, a girl in Edmonton. After the war he was going back there to marry her and make his fortune, but so far he’d not told his parents. His brief time in medical school had now faded so far into his memories that he couldn’t believe that less than two years ago his ambition was to be only a doctor.
It came as no surprise to Fleming and his crew to find that as newcomers they’d been assigned to one of the shabbiest aircraft on the Flight. When they’d first climbed into it the interior was littered with old newspapers and oily rags and the Elsan lavatory had not been properly emptied. There was a faint but pervasive smell of sweat, excrement and rotting meat. Fleming had conscripted his whole crew for the cleaning job. Now the plane smelled of fresh oil, metal polish and disinfectant. As Fleming had remarked, now it smelled ‘as clean as a hospital’, but he’d regretted the comparison as soon as he’d made it. Naming the plane ‘The Volkswagen’ had been part of Fleming’s desire to give the dirty old Z Zebra a new image.
Fleming’s bomb aimer and rear gunner were also officers. All three of them were standing around Fleming’s Austin Seven watching one of the electricians fix into it a length of Air Ministry wiring. The car was undergoing a major overhaul at the expense of His Majesty. The three officers had come to B Flight, with the rest of Zebra’s crew, six weeks ago, but so far they had not flown on an operation. They spent most of their time together and felt estranged from everyone else, for, as Fleming had remarked to Sweet, most of the other flyers of B Flight – including four of Fleming’s own crew – shared the Sergeants’ Mess with their ground-crew counterparts. It sounded like a provincial working man’s club. ‘Think yourself lucky not to be a member of it,’ Sweet had said smiling; ‘the only conversation is speculation, intoxication and fornication. Wait until you go to a Sergeants’ Mess dance, then you’ll get an insight into the great unwashed.’
Sweet, however, had no time for anything more than passing affability and they seldom saw him. They drifted around B Flight aimlessly. Faith, Hope, and Charity, the sergeants called them. They were creedless bishops, lost in a chapter of rough-tongued Jesuits. They knew that the first three operations by a new crew risked five times the normal casualty rate. They exchanged the litany of technical gen and letters from home and awaited their baptism. It would come tonight.
A mile or more away across the airfield Sweet could see the nearest of the other Flight’s aircraft, and to the right of it, beyond the bump, the Control Tower. On its roof a Meteorology WAAF officer was reading the instruments in the louvred box. At the south end of the runway there was the Aerodrome Control Post, and behind that the steeple of the thirteenth-century church in Little Warley village. He had a good view from here. He looked back to where the lorry that had brought them back from their weekend was turning round before going back along the main road past the village and entering the main gate empty, with Form 658 correctly signed just as Sweet had fiddled it with the Transport Officer. Near the gap in the fence Flight Sergeant Lambert was saying goodbye to his wife, who was getting a lift to the Safety Equipment Section where she worked.
‘Be a good chap, Eric,’ said Sweet. ‘Tell Lambert that I want a word with him. And on second thoughts I think the Bedford had better go back to the MT section straightaway. Can’t be too careful.’
‘I’ll tell the driver,’ said Eric.
‘And apologize to Mrs Lambert. She’ll have to walk. I really am sorry, tell her.’ When the airman left, Sweet closely examined his face in a wall mirror. He wondered why his skin went red and mottled in the sun instead of bronzed and handsome.
‘Take my bike, Ruth,’ said Lambert.
‘I can’t ride a bicycle, Sam. Not in this uniform skirt. I’ll walk.’
‘You’ll be all right?’
‘It’s only a mile. It will do me good.’
‘Mr Sweet would like a word with you, Chiefie,’ said the clerk.
Lambert kissed his wife goodbye. ‘You’ll know where we are going tonight before I shall.’
‘Look after yourself, Sam.’
‘I love you, Ruth. I’ll pop in and see you before we go.’ As he walked back to the Flight office, airmen were forming a line to await the arrival of the NAAFI van with morning tea and cakes. Lambert looked at his watch; it was ten to eleven.
Inside the Flight office, Flight Lieutenant Sweet was finishing a story as Lambert entered. ‘“… stop doing that, Sergeant,” she says, “I hold the King’s commission.”’ The two clerks and Sweet laughed.
He was still smiling as he turned to Lambert. ‘Well, the flap’s on, Sambo. Looks like everyone else around here has stolen a march on us. You’d better get your crew together and get your NFT done as early as possible. Captains and navigators at 3.30 this afternoon, main briefing at 5.0 pm.’
‘Can I change out of best blue into working uniform?’
‘That would mean you all going back to the Sergeants’ Mess, and by the time you shower, shave, shampoo and scrounge some coffee it’ll be lunchtime.’ Sweet smiled knowingly. ‘No, get cracking right away. Borrow parachutes and helmets from Tommy Carter’s bods or Mr Fleming’s crew.’
‘Any buzz on the target?’
‘Even if I did have, I’d not be able to tell the chaps.’ He moved some papers on his desk. ‘Oh, and by the by there’s a bit of a crew reshuffle. From tomorrow, young Cohen will be navigator S Sweet. Digby will be with me too. My chaps – Teddy and Speke – will be coming to you. You’re damned lucky to get them, Sambo, they’re damned good blokes.’
‘Transfer?’ said Lambert in amazement.
‘I know it’s damned rotten for you, Sambo. It’s just the sort of thing we all hate happening when chaps are crewed-up and happy, but Cohen is a raw kid, I’m going to have to nurse him a little.’ Sweet found a packet of cigarettes locked in a desk drawer. He rarely smoked but now was an exception. He offered them; Lambert declined. Sweet exhaled the smoke urgently. ‘Look, I know what you are thinking, Sambo, but this is the last thing I wanted, I can tell you.’ He found a packet of peppermints in the drawer and offered one of those to Lambert but he shook his head.
‘Your navigator stinks, and that bomb aimer Speke is what’s keeping you at the bottom of the photo ladder,’ said Lambert. ‘I don’t want to fly with them. You took Micky Murphy, my engineer, last month, after we’d had fifteen trips together. Isn’t that enough for you?’
