If you turned back from the target—and it happened all the time because of weather or technical problems with the aircraft—then those runs also didn’t count as an op, no matter how hair-raising. “Bloody unfair,” Teddy said. “Iniquitous, old chap,” Keith said in an atrocious attempt at a posh English accent. They were uproariously drunk at the time, on the forty-eight-hour stand-down after Turin. They should have turned back from Turin, Teddy realized that now, but he was one of those pilots who “pressed on.” Some didn’t.
The first time they ever turned back—only their second sortie—was because their starboard engine started leaking coolant over the North Sea and then the spark’s intercom packed up and so Teddy made what he thought was the sensible decision to turn for home, jettisoning their bombs harmlessly into the North Sea. Their CO—a different one from now—wasn’t impressed. He frowned upon early returns and he interrogated them for a long time about why they had thought they shouldn’t press on to the target. Teddy thought it was fairly obvious why—the engine was going to overheat and catch fire (in those early days they were less sanguine about such things) and they needed to be able to communicate with the spark. “Do you?” the CO said. “In an extremity you would manage surely? And a good pilot wouldn’t think twice about flying on only three engines.”
It was then that Teddy realized that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for the greater good. Birds thrown against a wall, in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break that wall. Statistics in one of Maurice’s great War Office ledgers. (“What a pompous ass he has become,” Ursula wrote crossly.)
And that was when Teddy resolved that he would not have their courage questioned again, they would not be Harris’s “weaker brethren,” but would “press on” to the target every time unless it was absolutely impossible, but that he would also do everything he could to keep them all alive. Over the rest of the first tour whenever they weren’t on ops he had them constantly doing parachute and ditching drills—unrealistic perhaps with neither air nor water to practise with, but if they knew what to do, if it literally was drilled into them, then they would—might—beat those overshadowing odds. When they had first crewed up at the OTU, Vic and Kenny had done more air-gunnery practice than anyone else. They had gone on dummy bombing runs to Immingham harbour and done countless fighter affiliation exercises, practising evasive manoeuvres. Teddy still took them up on as many cross-country exercises as he could and did fighter affiliation with the Spitfires from the nearest fighter station. He coaxed the whole crew into being proficient in Morse code and having an understanding of each other’s jobs so that in that unsympathetic CO’s “extremity” they might be able to understudy for one another. In theory, Keith, who had trained initially as a pilot, would be the best person to take over if something happened to Teddy, but Teddy had also trained Norman Best in the rudimentaries of flying, “because that bloody Aussie shearer might be able to fly the kite but he won’t be able to land the bloody thing.” Teddy swore a lot these days, blasphemy was infectious, but he still tried to avoid the worst words. Of course, if something happened to Teddy they were probably all doomed already anyway.
Teddy knew that Mac always worked out the route to the nearest neutral territory—Switzerland or Sweden or Portugal—and whenever it was a clear night he would hone his astro-navigational skills. And the shy and retiring Norman Best wore an entire set of French clothing, right down to the underwear, beneath his battledress, the clothes acquired in Paris when he was a student. An authentic French beret in his pocket too. A Boy Scout if ever there was one, Teddy thought. “Be prepared in mind by having thought out beforehand any accident or situation that might occur.” Somehow it seemed unlikely that his own Kibbo Kift training with a bow and arrow was going to be much of a help if he was on the run in France.
Norman did bail out over France, as it happened, flying with another crew on a second tour of duty in ’43, but his preparation for evading was all for nought as his parachute was already on fire when he exited the aircraft and he fell to earth like a fiery plumb bob, his body never recovered. Norman carried no good-luck charm, had no compulsive rite like George Carr, who had to turn round three times to the right, like a dog settling, before entering the aircraft and thought that no one noticed.
The wretched second dickey stood next to Teddy for take-off. He was called Guy—an old Etonian, he said, hoping to form some kind of bond with Teddy. “I didn’t go to Eton,” Teddy said rather dismissively. Guy had a lot to learn. If he lived long enough. (“What a mug,” Vic said.)