The photograph had acquired a stain, a swathe of brown smeared across the top, and when Bertie asked its origin Teddy said, “Tea, I think.”
When his first tour had finished Teddy had moved to an Operational Training Unit as an instructor, but asked to be put back on ops before his stint was up. “Why, for heaven’s sake?” Ursula wrote. “When you could have had a few more months of relative safety before having to do another tour?” “Relative” was a good word for an OTU in Teddy’s opinion. When he first arrived there he had looked out over the fields surrounding the station and counted the wreckage of at least five aircraft that had not yet been cleared away. At an OTU you were given clapped-out old kites to fly—pensioned-off aircraft mostly—as if the dice weren’t already loaded against green crews. Teddy didn’t ask about the fate of the occupants of the aircraft that littered the fields. He decided he would really rather not know.
“Well,” he wrote back to his sister, “the job isn’t finished yet.” Nowhere near, he thought. Thousands of birds had been flung against the wall and it was still standing. “And I’m a damned good pilot,” he added, “so I think I can serve the war effort better by flying than by coaching sprogs.”
He reread the letter. It sounded like a reasonable justification. One that he could present to his sister, to Nancy, to the world, although he was slightly resentful that he felt the need to justify himself when they were in the midst of battle. Hadn’t he been designated the family’s warrior? Although he suspected that this noble mantle might now have passed to Jimmy.
The truth was there was nothing else he wanted to do, could do. Flying on bombing raids had become him. Who he was. The only place he cared about was the inside of a Halifax, the smells of dirt and oil, of sour sweat, of rubber and metal and the tang of oxygen. He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, and the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now, he realized, he had been erased by it.
He had a new crew—gunners Tommy and Oluf, one a Geordie, the other a Norwegian. There were quite a few Norwegians in Bomber Command but not enough to form their own squadron, like the Poles had done. The Norwegians were almost as fierce as the bloodthirsty Poles in their commitment. They always pressed on. They lived for the day they could fly home to a free Poland. It didn’t happen, of course. He often thought of them as Poland negotiated its way through the twentieth century.
It was another motley crew. Sandy Worthington, his navigator, was from New Zealand; Geoffrey Smythson, his flight engineer, was a Cambridge graduate. (“Mathematics,” he said solemnly, as if it was a religion.) Teddy wondered if he knew Nancy and he said he had heard of her, she had won the Fawcett Prize, hadn’t she? “Clever girl,” he said. “Clever woman,” Teddy said. His wireless operator was Bob Booth from Leeds and his bomb-aimer was—
“G’day there, mate.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Teddy asked.
“Well, I was instructing at an OTU when I heard that the renowned Ted Todd had come back on ops early and I thought, He’s bloody well not flying without me. An Aussie squadron tried to claim me but I pulled a few strings.”
Ted had felt almost overwhelmed at the sight of Keith—he had been the one he was closest to in the old crew and they had shared so much that they couldn’t talk about with anyone else, yet on meeting again they had controlled themselves to a short manly handshake of greeting. Later, as the century wore on, Teddy observed how men seemed gradually to lose constraint where their feelings were concerned, until by the time the twentieth tipped into the twenty-first (and the advent of the unattractively named “noughties”) they gave the appearance of having lost control of their emotions altogether, perhaps their senses too. Footballers and tennis players blubbing all over the place, the ordinary man in the street embracing and kissing other men on the cheeks. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dad,” Viola said. “How can you think such crap? The stiff upper lip! Do you honestly think that the world was a better place when men kept their feelings hidden?”
“Yes.”
He still sometimes remembered with horror how he had broken down in Vic Bennett’s mother’s kitchen. He couldn’t see that it had done anyone any good, particularly him. When Nancy died he had wept quietly and privately, it had seemed the respectful way to mourn someone.
“I blame Diana,” Bertie said.
“Diana?”
“Princess. She made being hurt look heroic. Used to be the opposite in your day.” They were sitting on top of the White Horse at Kilburn eating sandwiches that a nice B&B landlady had packed for them at a stop on their farewell tour.
Like a dog, Teddy thought, he had had his day. “I’m too old for the world,” he said.
“Me too,” Bertie said.