It didn’t help when she simply turned away from him and walked off into the kitchen, where she drew a glass of water from the tap. She drank it down slowly and then placed the empty glass carefully on the draining board.
“I know,” he said furiously, yet still trying to keep his voice low as Viola was asleep upstairs.
Nancy looked at him sadly and said, “No, Teddy. You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”
1942–43
Teddy’s War
Experience
“Twenty minutes to the run in to the target, skipper.”
“OK, navigator.”
They had ploughed their way through the flak put up by the coastal defences and dog-legged faithfully along the flight plan over occupied territory before making it through the thick belt of searchlights that girdled the Ruhr. There had been very little cloud on the run in and they had occasionally been able to make out lights below—a factory at work or a blackout not being strictly observed. More than once, torches or lamps had flashed up at them and, over Holland, Norman Best, their quiet flight engineer, had read out loud the Morse code from a well-wisher below, dit-dit-dit-dah. V for victory. It was a message of both faith and comfort that they saw frequently.
“Thanks, pal, whoever you are,” Teddy heard the rear-gunner say. The rear-gunner was a scrawny, red-headed Scot, eighteen years old and the talkative sort, but he made an effort to keep his volubility for when they were on the ground. Teddy’s crew knew that he favoured silence on the intercom unless there was something that needed saying. It was too easy to start chattering, especially on the way back when everyone was more relaxed, but even a moment’s distraction, especially for the gunners, and that was it. End of the story.
Teddy felt the same as his rear-gunner did about the anonymous Dutchman—or woman—down there. It was good to know that they were appreciated up here. They were so cut off from the ground—even when they were destroying it with their bombs (especially when they were destroying it with their bombs, perhaps)—that you could sometimes forget that there were entire nations for whom you were the last hope.
I can see the target markers going down, skipper, twenty miles ahead cherry-red.”
“OK, bomb-aimer.”
It was the final op of their tour and they were edgy with foreboding. They had beaten the odds to get to tonight and were all wondering if fate could be so cruel as to bring them this far and then give them the chop. (It could. They knew.) “Just one more, Jesus, just one more,” he had heard his godless Australian bomb-aimer murmuring as they waited on the runway for the green Aldis light.
It had been a terrific slog to reach the requisite thirty. Some of their sorties only counted as a third of an op. “Gardening” runs—mine-laying in the Dutch shipping channels or off the Frisian coast—or attacking targets in France only chalked up a third of an op. Occupied France was considered a “friendly” country, but friendly or not it was still full of Germans trying to shoot them down. It was true you were more likely to be killed on a raid over Germany (“Four times more likely,” according to Ursula’s girl at the Air Ministry), but you were still risking your life. It was rather iniquitous, Teddy thought. Or, in the more straightforward language of his bomb-aimer, “Bloody unfair.” Keith was the first person that Teddy crewed up with at the OTU.
Crewing up was an unexpected affair that had taken them largely by surprise. All the components—pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers and gunners—were simply emptied in a jumble into a hangar and told by the station commander, “Right, chaps, sort yourselves out best as you can,” as if some mysterious law of attraction would form a better bomber crew than any military procedure. And, strangely, that seemed to be true, as far as Teddy could see anyway.
They had all milled about aimlessly for a while like a flock of geese in a farmyard at feeding time, somewhat abashed by what was being asked of them. “It’s like a bloody dance hall, waiting to catch some girl’s eye,” Keith said, approaching Teddy and introducing himself, “Keith Marshall, I’m a bomb-aimer,” his dark-blue uniform marking him out as Australian.