At one point on the route another Halifax had passed right over the top of them with only twenty or so feet clearance, a great dark shape like a whale, one with red-hot exhausts. And later, on the track to the target, Vic Bennett, in the mid-upper turret, had started yelling blue murder because there was a Lancaster above them that had just opened its bomb doors and Teddy had to jink away from it, worrying that they in turn would slam into another aircraft.
They had witnessed a collision too close for their own comfort when a Halifax on their port beam crossed the bomber stream and a Lancaster flew smack into it. Their own aircraft—J-Jig, before they lost her—was rocked by the massive explosion. Bright white sheets of flame shot up from the petrol tanks in the wings of the Lanc and Teddy shouted at his gunners not to look in case they lost their night vision.
There had been no trouble finding Cologne. By the time they reached the target it was ablaze, filthy red flames and smoke everywhere that had already hidden the marker flares, so they headed for the centre of the largest fire and dropped their bombs and banked away. Looking back, despite the colossal size of the enterprise, it seemed like an uneventful raid, and to tell the truth, Teddy could barely remember the details of it now. It felt as if he had lived many lifetimes. Or perhaps just the one endless night that, according to Blake, some were born to.
And time itself had a different quality. Before it had been like a vast map—seemingly endless—that had been unrolled before him and on which he could choose in which direction to go. Now the map only unrolled beneath his feet a step ahead at a time and might at any moment disappear. “I felt the same at the height of the attacks on London,” Ursula said, attempting to decode this tortuous metaphor when he saw her on his first leave—they had six days off every six weeks, and he had chosen to spend them in London rather than Fox Corner. He didn’t even tell Sylvie he had leave.
“Before the war,” Ursula said, “every day was much the same, wasn’t it? Home, the office, home again. Routine dulls the senses so. And then suddenly it feels as if one’s living on the forward edge of one’s life, as if one never knows if one is about to fall or fly.” Neither extreme seemed to involve a soft landing, Teddy noticed.
“I suppose so,” he agreed, realizing he had no real idea what he was talking about and didn’t much care. He lived his life in the face of death. It was a simple enough reduction without hedging it around with figurative language.
Eight minutes to target, skipper.”
“OK, navigator.”
“Stay alert, gunners.”
“Yes, skipper.”
“OK, skip.”
The gunners didn’t need reminding, it was just a way of keeping everyone in touch. He knew they were swinging their guns around the sky, ever vigilant. They had hardly fired their guns in the whole of the tour. As soon as you started shooting you marked yourself as a target. A fighter could easily miss you in the dark, but if you were laying a thread of red tracer fire right to your door he would soon find you. And his big cannon would do a lot more damage than their own puny Browning machine guns could. Gunners were—essentially—your lookouts. There were gunners who went through a whole tour without ever firing off a round.
Teddy’s sister Pamela was married to a doctor who told him that he had read some data about experiments in oxygen chambers and that oxygen would help the gunners’ eyesight, which was also the first thing that would go if they started to suffer from oxygen deprivation. After that Teddy had started keeping his gunners on oxygen from take-off to landing.
They were in the thick of a heavily defended area. A grey curtain of smoke from the flak barrage lay dead ahead of them, a curtain of explosive that they had to get through.
Compared to those big thousand-bomber raids, tonight was a relatively modest one, some two hundred or so aircraft—twelve from their own squadron—all heading in their loose gaggle towards the Ruhr, the Happy Valley.
They had seen a Lancaster go down, hit in the wing by a fighter, seen it turn into a falling leaf of fire, and they had seen, too, a fellow Halifax being coned as it came through the Ruhr’s defences. It was caught in the blue master beam and they watched without comment as the slave beams turned, like soulless automata, towards their prey, trapping it in blinding white light and pumping their shells remorselessly up at it. The aircraft dived desperately into a corkscrew, but the beams were locked relentlessly on it and the heavy flak must have found it because they saw it explode in a great ball of flame.
“Log that, navigator,” Teddy said in a dispassionate voice. “Did anyone see any parachutes?”