“It’ll be me that’s blushing,” Kenny Nielson said.
Luck was everything. “No lady,” according to Keith, “just a bloody tart.” Superstition was rampant on the station. Everyone in the squadron seemed to have their own voodoo—a lock of hair, a St. Christopher, a playing card, the ubiquitous rabbit foot. There was a flight sergeant who always sang “La Donna è Mobile” in the crew room when they were getting dressed in their flying clothes and another who had to put his left boot on before his right. If he forgot he had to take all his kit off and start again. He survived the war. The flight sergeant who sang “La Donna è Mobile” did not. Nor the other hundreds with their weird rites and sacraments. The dead were legion and the gods had their own secret agenda.
Keith did not have a mascot, claiming that his whole family was “widdershins,” their luck back-to-front, and he could probably have walked under a ladder with a dozen black cats crossing in front of him and he would be “just fine.” His convict antecedents were Irish gypsies, deported to Australia for vagrancy. “Not proper gypsies, probably,” he said. “Rogues and tramps, I expect.”
Kenny Nielson was the youngest in a family of ten, “the bairn,” and his lucky mascot was a shabby little black cat—just the one—made of pieces of felt sewn together rather ham-fistedly by one of his many nieces. It was a deplorable creature that looked as if it had spent most of its life in the mouth of a dog.
And, yes, Teddy’s ju-ju was the silver hare that Ursula had given him, which he had initially treated with careless disregard but which now flew every op cradled snugly in his battledress pocket, lodged above his heart. He had unconsciously developed his own ritual, touching the hare like a relic before take-off and after landing, a silent prayer and thank-you. Not that he could feel the little inanimate creature through the thick layers of his sheepskin flying jacket and Mae West. But he knew it was there, silently doing its best to keep him safe.
They mooched morosely around as they waited for the WAAF to bring Vic back. George Carr ate his chocolate ration as usual. Everyone else saved theirs for later, but George reasoned that he might die during the raid and “never get to enjoy it.” Chocolate had been in short supply in his Lancashire childhood, he said.
They smoked their last cigarette for the next six hours or so, emptied their bladders against S-Sugar’s tail and stared glumly at the ground. Even their normally chirpy little Scot was silenced. The poor second dickey was beginning to look as if he was on the way to his execution. “Are they always like this?” he muttered to Teddy, and Teddy, who could hardly say to the poor boy, “They think they’re for the chop tonight,” instead betrayed the collective character of his crew and said, “No, they’re just a miserable bunch of so-and-sos.”
That morning Teddy had received a letter from Ursula. Inconsequential stuff, but at the end she had written, “How are you?” and the emotion compressed into those three laconic monosyllables seemed to rise off the page and unfold into something so much larger and more heartfelt. “All is well here,” he wrote back, with equal compression. “Don’t worry about me,” he added, giving her the reassuring gift of a disyllable.
He asked a WAAF, a parachute packer called Nellie Jordan who was sweet on him, to post the letter. The WAAFs were all sweet on Teddy. He suspected this was simply because he had been around longer than most crew members. It was a letter to be sent, not one to be kept in his locker in the event of him not coming back. Teddy had three of those, one for his mother, one for Ursula, one for Nancy. They all said much the same thing, that he loved them and that they mustn’t mourn him too much because he died doing something he believed in and they should get on with their lives because that was what he would want. And so on. He didn’t think this one-sided, final correspondence was a place for soul-searching or philosophical introspection. Or for truth, for that matter. It had felt strange to write about himself in a future where he didn’t exist, a kind of metaphysical conundrum.