They roared towards the farmhouse and Teddy looked for the farmer’s daughter but could see no sign of her. He felt a chill. She was always there. He could see the flat fields in the dusk, the bare brown earth, the darkening horizon. The farmhouse. The farmyard. They banked and began to circle, stacking and gathering themselves before heading for the coast, and as F-Fox’s wing dipped to port he caught sight of her. She was gazing up at them, waving blindly, waving at them all. They were safe. He waved back, although he knew she couldn’t see him.
The squadrons in the north had to take off an hour earlier than those on the more southerly airfields and then had to fly due south to meet at the rendezvous point. It gave them some relatively safe time to get on with their routine tasks. Once they were in the air there were no idle moments, all that gloomy introspection that could take hold on the ground disappeared. The flight engineer was kept busy synchronizing the engines, calculating fuel stocks, changing petrol tanks. The IFF was switched on to identify them as friend rather than foe to the RAF’s own fighters. The spark wound out the trailing wireless aerial and the navigator put his head down, working on accurate fixes, comparing the actual winds to those forecast. Once they were over the sea the bomb-aimer started chucking Window out. They were still flying with their navigation lights on and Teddy could see the red and green lights twinkling on the wingtips of other aircraft.
They ground their way over the North Sea, climbing all the time. The waves were highlighted by the moon and the wings of F-Fox glinted like polished silver. They may as well have had a searchlight shining on them. The gunners tested their Brownings in short bursts over the sea. The bombs were fused, the navigation lights switched off. At five thousand feet they put their oxygen masks on and Teddy heard the familiar rasping breathing over the intercom.
They were bowled across Belgium by a following wind. Visibility was so good that they could see many of the other aircraft in the bomber stream. It was as close to a daylight raid as Teddy had ever been. His life took place at night. The wide-awake moon could be seen reflected in lakes and rivers as they passed over them, escorting them, mile after spot-lit mile. There’s not a trace upon her face of diffidence or shyness. Hugh had loved his Gilbert and Sullivan gramophone records. There had been an amateur performance of The Mikado put on in the local village hall and their father had astonished them all by taking the role of Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner. He had relished the complete change of character it had afforded him, leering and prancing and singing around the stage. “Quite the Jekyll and Hyde,” Sylvie said. Mrs. Shawcross had played Katisha. Again, another thespian revelation.
They reached the first turning point near Charleroi and not long after that the slaughter began.
There were fighters everywhere, like angry wasps whose nest had been disturbed. It was a shock to meet them so early, and so many of them. Not a nest that had been disturbed but a swarm that seemed to have been waiting for them.
“I can see an aircraft going down in flames off the port bow,” the mid-upper gunner reported.
“Log that, navigator,” Fraser said.
“OK, skipper.”
The rear-gunner’s voice this time, “One going down on the starboard beam.”
“Log that, navigator.”
Teddy, standing next to Fraser, could see stricken aircraft everywhere. The sky was scattered with the bright white stars of explosions.
“Are they scarecrows, sir?” the bomb-aimer asked. Fraser was “skipper,” Teddy noticed, and the crew had plumped for “sir” for Teddy so as not to confuse them with each other. They had all heard the rumour that the Germans were using “scarecrows”—anti-aircraft shells simulating exploding bombers—but it had always seemed unlikely to Teddy. He saw some of the bright white stars belching the dirty, oily red flames that were only too familiar to him. His sprog crew had never seen a bomber shot down until now. Baptism of fire, he thought.
Some floated down like large leaves, others plummeted straight to the earth. A fellow Halifax over on their port beam flew past with all four engines on fire, spilling streams of burning petrol, but too far away to see if there were any crew aboard. Suddenly its wings collapsed like a drop-leaf table and it fell from the sky like a dead bird.