He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. Quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.
He knew that he was just stooging around, doing nothing useful. These fits of restlessness, mental and physical, seemed to be increasing all the time. Sometimes he found himself drifting off, lost not so much in thought as no thought at all, and without realizing it he found himself now at the pigeon loft. The homing pigeons were kept in a shed behind the crews’ Nissan-hut sleeping quarters and were looked after by one of the cooks, who was a pigeon fancier and missed his own racing birds, back in Dewsbury.
Teddy made the dog stay outside the shed. It always barked at the birds and set them fluttering nervously, even though they were generally, by their nature, a steadfast, even heroic sort of creature. The theory was that the pigeons on board an aircraft could be used to relay messages and that in the event of ditching or parachuting out you could write your location down and put it in a little canister and the bird would carry this precious information home. It seemed to Teddy, however, that it was highly unlikely that if you were trying to evade in enemy territory anyone would find you because of some incoherent scribble. You would have to know where you were, for a start, and the bird would have to overcome tremendous odds just to make it back to British shores. (He wondered if the girl from the Air Ministry had any figures for that.) The Germans kept hawks along the French coast solely for the purpose of bringing the poor birds down.
And, of course, you would have to remember to get a bird out of the basket that was stowed in the fuselage and stuff it into a container that was not much bigger than a vacuum flask (a tricky feat in itself). Bailing out of a crippled bomber involved—at best—a mad life-or-death scramble to clip on parachutes, throw off escape hatches, help the wounded out, while all the time the aircraft was on fire or in an uncontrollable dive. The poor pigeons would not be uppermost in anyone’s mind in those last few desperate seconds. He wondered how many of them had been left behind, helplessly trapped in their baskets, abandoned to burn or drown or simply disintegrate in a little cloud of feathers when an aircraft exploded. Everyone knew not to put the pigeons on the Wing Co’s kite.
Teddy was soothed by the soft cooing and the earthy ammoniac smell of the dim shed. He took one of the compliant birds from its hatch and stroked it gently. It suffered his attentions without protest. When he put it back it eyed him steadily and he wondered what it was thinking. Not much, he supposed. When he came back outside, into the harsh daylight, the dog sniffed him suspiciously for signs of infidelity.
It was lunchtime and he set off for the mess. He had little appetite these days but he forced the food down in a dutiful fashion. There was a particularly stodgy kind of steamed sponge pudding containing prunes that translated as “plum duff” on the blackboard menu and which sat heavily in his stomach afterwards. He remembered with pleasure something called a Far Breton that he had eaten beneath a hot French sun. The French could transform even prunes into something delicious. He had made an emergency landing at Elvington, where the French crews were stationed, and discovered that their cooks were also French and they treated their rations with a good deal more élan than the RAF canteen staff. And what’s more, they took their meals with a glass of red wine, Algerian, but wine nonetheless. They would not have tolerated a plum duff.
The crews had spent the rest of the afternoon resting—writing letters, playing darts, listening to the wireless in the mess, always tuned to the BBC Forces programme. Some slept. A lot of them had been on ops last night and had not fallen into their beds until well after first light.