On their next sortie the crew of C-Charlie, who had so reluctantly taken Teddy as their second dickey, ran out of fuel looking for somewhere to land in fog and crashed on the moors near Helmsley. “Their thirteenth,” Vic Bennett said, as if that explained it. He was the most superstitious of all of them. When they flew their own thirteenth op, to Stuttgart—on a Friday, no less—he asked the chaplain to put a special blessing on poor old J-Jig, which the chaplain, a jolly, obliging sort, did quite happily.
The first five ops and the last five ops were believed by crews to be the most dangerous, although as far as Teddy could see the laws of probability applied every time. Only one in six aircrew made it through their first tour. (Never before or since, he thought, would so many be so obsessed with statistics.) He hadn’t needed Ursula’s girl in the Air Ministry to tell him that the odds were stacked against them. At the beginning of this tour, if Teddy had been a gambling man, which he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have laid bets on them living to see their grandchildren. Or their children, for that matter, as they hadn’t even reached that stage in their lives yet. None of them were married and according to Teddy’s reckoning at least half of them had been virgins when he first met them. Were any of them now? He didn’t know. Not Vic Bennett, he was engaged to a girl called Lillian (Lil) who he never stopped talking about, including everything they “got up to.”
Vic was getting married to Lillian next week; they were all invited. Teddy didn’t think Vic should have made plans. He didn’t make plans himself any more. There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky. (“What a fine Buddhist monk you would make,” Ursula said.)
“If you look at the percentage loss,” Ursula’s girl from the Air Ministry said, sipping primly on a pink gin, “then, mathematically speaking, death is inevitable.” There were other ways of looking at the figures, she added hastily when Ursula glared at her. Teddy met her when he was on leave the following May. The three of them went for a drink together and then on to dancing at the Hammersmith Palais. Teddy didn’t enjoy himself, he had the uncomfortable feeling that every time the girl from the Air Ministry looked at him she was seeing a set of actuarial tables.
Did Nancy know the cold calculus of death in Bomber Command? Probably not. She was cocooned somewhere in the clinical safety of an intellectual post. She was trying to make arrangements to see him in London as soon as the tour finished. She had written, “Perhaps I could come to your colleague’s wedding? Can you wangle an invitation or are girlfriends considered surplus to requirements?!” The tone of this letter felt all wrong to him. The unfortunate use of the word “colleague,” for one. Vic Bennett wasn’t a “colleague.” He was part of Teddy, like an arm or a leg. He was a pal, a mate, a comrade. If civilization survived—and it was currently hanging in the balance—would it be as a society of equals? A new Jerusalem full of Levellers and Diggers? And it wasn’t just the RAF, surely, where class barriers had broken down as everyone was forced to muck in together. Teddy rubbed shoulders with men—and women—he would never have come across in a world of public school, Oxbridge, banking. He might be their captain, he might be responsible for them, but he wasn’t their superior.
He had burnt Nancy’s letter in the stove in his hut. They were always short of fuel.
Four minutes to target, skipper.”
“OK, navigator.”
“Four minutes to target, bomb-aimer.”
“OK, skipper.”
“That ruddy port inner’s still not happy, skipper,” Norman Best said. The light on the fuel pressure gauge had been flicking on and off for the whole flight, seemingly living a life of its own. It was the same engine that had delayed their take-off and Norman had been monitoring it suspiciously for some time now. It was just as well they’d been late getting off, Vic Bennett said. He, of all people, had somehow or other managed to forget his good-luck charm and had persuaded the WAAF driver who had brought them out to dispersal to race him back to the crew room to retrieve this item while the ground crew worked on the misbehaving engine. They were the unsung heroes of the “spanner brigade”—the riggers and fitters and mechanics. NCOs or lowly erks, they worked all day and night in every kind of weather. They waved them off when they left and greeted them when they returned. They might stay out all night in their huts on bleak dispersals waiting for “their” aircraft to return safely. No good-luck charms for them, just civil handshakes all round on departure and “See you in the morning then.”
Vic Bennett’s own particular fetish was a pair of red satin knickers belonging to his fiancée, the aforesaid Lil. These “unmentionables,” as Vic called them, were carried, neatly folded, in the pocket of his battledress on every trip. “If we make it to his wedding,” Keith said, “I know what we’ll all be thinking about when the blushing bride walks down the aisle.”