If he were to die, someone from the committee of adjustment—a ridiculous euphemism—would come and swiftly clear away his kit. Anything that would give a mother or a wife pause for thought—smutty photos, letters to other women or French letters—would be put in a different bag. Not that Teddy had any indiscretions to hide, none that would leave tangible evidence anyway. He sometimes wondered what happened to these benevolently censored items—were they simply thrown away or was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets? He never did find out the answer to this question.
The following year, during his second tour, he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.
Sometimes when a new crew arrived at a station they found that the belongings of the previous occupants of their Nissan huts were still strewn around the place as if they were about to walk back in. The committee of adjustment would shoo them out while they “cleared up,” packing away the dead crew’s belongings as WAAFs or orderlies stripped the beds and made them up anew. And sometimes those same sprogs would go up on a sortie that night and not come back and never even sleep in those newly made beds. They could come and go without anyone even knowing who they were. Their names written on water. Or scorched into the earth. Or atomized into the air. Legion.
Vic Bennett arrived back, bearing aloft the unmentionables (“And yet mentioned so often,” Mac said sardonically), and they climbed into S-Sugar, J-Jig’s replacement. J-Jig had been an unwieldy beast. Like a lot of the Mark IIs she had seemed reluctant to leave the ground. If she’d been a horse she would be the kind that you had to encourage to start the race, let alone finish, and if you hadn’t known about her, if you hadn’t been warned about her foibles, particularly her suicidal desire to swerve to the right, then it could have been the end of you before you had even begun.
Tonight was only the second op they had flown in S-Sugar. It was a new kite, straight from the factory floor, as fresh as her crew had once been. They had all wanted to finish their tour in J-Jig, already an object of fond reminiscence. She had brought them luck, she had kept them safe and they were still resentful at her loss and convinced it was yet another sign that they weren’t going to make it to thirty. She had had twenty-six bombs stencilled on her fuselage, one for every mission flown, a key for her twenty-first mission and an ice-cream cornet that some joker had given her for a raid on Italy. S-Sugar’s only op so far, to Dusseldorf, hadn’t yet been commemorated and despite her newness none of them trusted her. The overheating port engine was just one of many niggles.
Their CO had hitched a ride out to dispersal with Vic and was fretting now at the time. “Ten minutes,” he said, tapping his watch. Ten minutes to get off or they would be out of time and would have to be scrubbed.
The truck with the WAAF and the CO aboard followed them along the perimeter track and parked by the flying-control caravan, where they climbed out and joined a rather ragged-looking farewell party that was waiting patiently to wave them off. Teddy suspected some of them had given up hope that they were ever going to go and had abandoned them.
They lumbered along the runway, everyone waving enthusiastically at them, particularly the CO, who made a point of always being there at every take-off and often gave the impression that he believed that if he waved vigorously enough—with both arms aloft, running along the flare path beside them—he would help them lift their wheels successfully and drag their full bellies of bombs into the air. Crashing on take-off accounted for so much loss of life that it was always a moment of supreme reprieve for Teddy when he had managed to haul the Halifax off the concrete and above the hedges and trees.