A murmuring of “no”s on the intercom, a “poor bastards” from Keith, settled flat out on his front in the nose of the aircraft, ready for the run in. It was always a shocking thing to see an aircraft going down but there wasn’t time to think about it. It wasn’t you, that was the important thing.
If we go, Teddy prayed, let us go instantly, the fireball not the fall. There would be no soft landing, whichever way. He was fatalistic rather than morbid. The last thing his crew needed at the moment—at any moment—was a despondent captain. Especially tonight when they were so jittery. They looked exhausted too, Teddy thought, a weariness that went beyond mere tiredness. What they looked was old, Teddy realized. And yet Keith had only just celebrated his twenty-first birthday, with a raucous party held in the sergeants’ mess. There was an innocence in all their celebrations, like naughty boys at a noisy children’s party. The sooty footprints on the ceiling, the unseemly lyrics of the sing-songs around the piano after the WAAFs had decorously retired for the night (a bolder one or two sometimes remaining). Not so very different from Augustus and his little pals, after all.
Sylvie, rather inclined to indolent timekeeping, kept the clocks at Fox Corner running ten minutes ahead (a practice that tended to lead to confusion rather than punctuality). Teddy thought now how much better it would have been if someone had pushed their clock backward, if they had been led to think that this was their twenty-ninth sortie rather than their thirtieth, freeing them from their gloomy premonitions.
To make matters worse, they had a second dickey on board. He was a novice pilot being blooded on his first trip. It was customary to send a tyro up with an experienced crew for a “look-see” before he took his own crew on operations, but for some reason a green second pilot was regarded as a jinx. There was no rhyme or reason to this belief as far as Teddy could see. His own first blood was drawn on a flight to bomb the docks at Wilhelmhaven with C-Charlie, a crew on their twelfth op, and they had barely acknowledged his existence, as if by ignoring him they could pretend he wasn’t sitting there in the dickey seat. C-Charlie came back with hardly any damage—some holes from flak and one engine out—but even after they had landed the crew still avoided him as if he might taint them somehow. Unlike his own crew, who were overjoyed to have him back “safe and sound” on the earth, and they all went on a mighty crew binge at a local pub, ground crew included, to celebrate this fact. The Black Swan, known by everyone as the Mucky Duck, had a very accommodating landlord who let the aircrews have running tabs knowing that many of them would never be paid. The dead reckoning.
On Teddy’s second tour there was a sprog crew—W-William was their aircraft—who lost their pilot when he took his flight with another crew. They were immediately given a replacement, who duly took his dickey flight and also didn’t come back. (Perhaps they were bad luck, after all.) The pilotless sprog crew were beside themselves at this point, like anxious dogs, and so when they were given a third (understandably nervous) pilot Teddy took the whole crew up on their first op together, the new pilot in the dickey seat of W-William, his own aircraft. It was a testing maximum-effort raid to Berlin and they more than held their nerve.
When they landed they were filled with jubilation. “Well done, boys,” he said. They were boys, not one over twenty. They invited him to have a drink with them in the sergeants’ mess—he was, after all, part of their crew, they said. He went but bowed out early, “Discretion being the better part of valour,” he wrote to Ursula, as it was one of her favourite aphorisms.
“Not always,” she wrote back.
W-William was on the battle order next day, a relatively safe mine-laying trip to drop “veg” off Langeoog in the east Frisians. Teddy felt more than usually sad when reading the familiar entry in the operations log the next day. This aircraft took off at 16.20 hours and failed to return. It has therefore been reported as missing. He found it difficult after the war to look at the North Sea without thinking of it as one enormous, watery graveyard, full of the rust and bones of aircraft and youthful bodies.