“You certainly know how to treat a girl,” Nancy said, good humour restored.
The dog didn’t reappear when Teddy whistled. He scanned the beach, the sea, a bubble of panic rising in his chest. The dog always came when he whistled. The Channel looked calm but it was a small dog and perhaps it had worn itself out by swimming too much, or it had met a treacherous current or a fishing net. He thought of Vic Bennett slipping beneath the waves. Well, good luck to you then. Nancy was walking up and down the beach, shouting the dog’s name. He knew its senses were tuned to some higher animal frequency. His ground crew had told Teddy how Lucky would wait with them for his return and knew long before they did when his aircraft was approaching the airfield. If he was late returning or had to make an emergency landing elsewhere the dog remained resolutely at its post. When Teddy finally didn’t return at all, when he was taken prisoner by the Germans, the dog remained for days, gazing steadfastly at the sky, waiting.
Eventually the dog was returned to Ursula’s care and when he came home Teddy didn’t claim it back, much as he would have liked to. He had Nancy as his companion, he reasoned, but his sister had no one and loved the little dog almost as much as he did.
Not long ago the dog had stowed away on Q-Queenie. They had never quite been able to work out how. It was sometimes in the habit of hitching a ride in the lorry that transported them to dispersal, although no one remembered seeing it on this occasion and the first they knew of it being on board was after they had reached their rendezvous point over Hornsea when it had slunk—rather guiltily—from beneath the port rest position where it had concealed itself.
“Ay up,” Bob Booth, their wireless operator, announced over the intercom, “we seem to have got ourselves a little second dickey.” The fact that this was against all rules, more so probably even than taking a WAAF up in the air, wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they were already above five thousand feet and Teddy had just told everyone to put their oxygen masks on. The dog already looked unsteady on its feet, although that could well have been due to being inside a monstrous four-engined bomber struggling to reach operational height over the North Sea.
Teddy had suddenly remembered Mac singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” on the journey back from Turin. He didn’t think that Lucky was capable of anything so outlandish, but there was no doubt that the inevitable outcome of oxygen deprivation would be the same for both men and dogs.
Perhaps the dog had just been curious to know where they went when they climbed inside their metal behemoths. Perhaps its loyalty to Teddy had driven it, or a desire to test its own canine courage. Who knew the mind of a dog?
Everyone but the gunners shared their masks with the dog, an awkward experience for all concerned. “Oxygen,” Teddy said to the dog as he placed his own mask over its small snout. Luckily it was a gardening run in the Dutch shipping channels rather than a long raid to the Big City. After they had landed safely, Teddy smuggled the dog out of the aircraft, stuffed inside his flying jacket.
After that Teddy tried to remember to take a spare oxygen mask on board so that in the event of another stowaway they would be able to hook them up to the central oxygen. Although who in their right mind would want to stow away on a bomber?
He turned round and suddenly the dog was there, bounding along the beach, looking rather tired but without the vocabulary to tell him of any adventure it might have had.
Reunited, they ambled along the pier until they were stopped by a photographer and agreed to have a snap taken. Teddy paid the man and gave his squadron address and when he came back from his six days’ leave, the photograph—which he had already forgotten about—was waiting for him. It was a nice one and he wondered about getting more copies—for Nancy perhaps—although he never got round to doing anything about it. He was in his uniform, of course, and Nancy was wearing a summer dress and a pretty straw hat, the cheap wedding ring invisible. They were both smiling as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Lucky was with them, also looking happy with himself.
Teddy carried the photograph in his battledress pocket, beside the silver hare. It survived the war and the camp, and was thrown, rather carelessly, into a box of mementos and trophies afterwards. “Objets de vertu,” Bertie said, looking through this box after he moved to Fanning Court. She was always fascinated by Nancy, the grandmother she had never known. “And a dog!” she said, drawn immediately to the little dog’s cheerful demeanour. (“Lucky,” Teddy said fondly. The dog had been dead for over forty years but he still felt a little stab of sadness to the heart when he thought of its absence from the world.)