That first night after crewing up they went on the obligatory crew binge. The egalitarian spirit meant that everyone must take their turn to buy a round, so six pints later they staggered back to their sleeping quarters as drunk as lords and declaring their undying friendship. Teddy had never been so inebriated in his life, and he realized as he lay on top of his bunk that night, the room revolving around him, that he had never been as elated either. Or at least not for a long time, not since he was a boy perhaps. He was about to have an adventure.
They were all NCOs apart from Teddy. He had been given a commission, for no other reason, as far as he could tell, than that he had been to the right school and the right university and that, when asked, he had said that, yes, he liked cricket, which he didn’t that much actually but he could see to say so would be the wrong answer. And that was why he was here now, months later, en route to Duisburg, a leader of men, the master of his fate, the captain of his soul and of a bloody big four-engined Halifax with an unnerving tendency to swing to the right on take-off and landing.
Ten minutes to target, skipper.”
“OK, navigator. Ten minutes to target, bomb-aimer.”
“OK, skipper.”
In the air they addressed each other by their roles but on the ground they were defined by themselves—Ted, Norman, Keith, Mac, George, Vic and Kenny. Like playmates in a storybook adventure, Teddy thought. Two of Augustus’s “pals” were called Norman and George, but Izzie’s Augustus and his cohorts were still eleven years old, forever young, and occupied with their catapults, with catching minnows and raiding the larder for jars of jam, which for some reason they seemed to regard as the holy grail of foodstuffs. Izzie’s creation and his band of merry boys were currently “doing their bit” in Augustus and the War—scavenging for paper by taking the newspaper from people’s letter-boxes and collecting scrap metal for salvage by stealing pots and pans from the Swifts’ outraged neighbours. (“ ‘The frying-pan isn’t scrap,’ an exasperated Mrs. Swift said. ‘But it’s for the war,’ Augustus protested. ‘You’re always sayin’ we have to give up things. I’m givin’ up people’s pans.’ ”) Izzie’s Augustus, Teddy thought rather resentfully, didn’t have to deal with flak or worry about a Messerschmitt descending on him like a hungry bird of prey.
His own Augustus—his grown-up double, as he imagined him—was almost certainly dodging life in the services. He was probably a spiv, a war profiteer, selling spirits and fags and anything else he could get his mucky hands on. (“There you go, guv, that’ll be ten bob. Remember, mum’s the word.”)
They were toiling through flak—continual shell flashes and oily grey puffs of smoke buffeting them—although the noise of the explosions was drowned out by the aircraft’s own deafening Merlin engines.
“Keep a sharp lookout, everyone,” Teddy said.
In the distance he could see a shower of incendiaries coming down, being jettisoned probably by an aircraft trying to gain more height. All it did was provide helpful illumination for the German fighters flying above the bomber stream who were dropping marker flares—pretty, like chandeliers—that seemed to hang in the air, providing a well-lit corridor for the unfortunate bomber to fly along. Seconds later the bomber erupted into a blood-red fireball, belching black smoke.
“Log that, navigator,” Teddy said.
“OK, skipper.”
They had taken off late. As an experienced crew they would normally have been near the front of the bomber stream, but there had been trouble with the port inner engine and they became the last rather than the first aircraft to take off from their station and were right at the tail of the skein when they reached the rendezvous point over Flamborough Head. “Well, someone has to bring up the rear,” Teddy said, in a rather futile attempt to encourage his downhearted crew. They all knew that being a straggler made them an easier target for the fighters to pick off—a distinct little blip on the German radar rather than part of a protective flock.
A crowded bomber stream presented its own terrors, of course. Earlier in their tour they had been part of Harris’s first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne. In a great Armada like that you found yourself wallowing in someone else’s slipstream, wondering all the time where everyone else was. It had seemed to Teddy that the greatest danger came not from the German fighters or flak but from their own side. They had been stacked in layers, the slow Stirlings at the bottom, the high-flying Lancs at the top, the Halifaxes providing the filling in the sandwich. The exact speed, height and position for each aircraft was predetermined, but that didn’t mean that everyone was where they were supposed to be.