Of course, he wasn’t the first second dickey they had carried and they had flown with a couple of odd bods when various members of the crew hadn’t been able to go on ops. George Carr had been given leave to go to his father’s funeral. Mac had missed an op because of stomach ’flu and Kenny had a sprained ankle that put him out of action for a raid on Bremen (the result of one of Teddy’s parachute drills). Vic Bennett had missed J-Jig’s final eventful op to Turin last week because of a debilitating cold.
Mac had made up his numbers flying with another crew but that still left both their gunners an op short of a full tour. They would have to fly as odd bods in someone else’s crew. Unlucky mascots.
On the Turin raid they had flown with a replacement air-gunner in Vic’s position in the mid-upper turret. He had a soft West Country burr (“Zummerzet”) and spoke no more than a few words on the whole trip.
They had flown over the snowy peaks of the Alps by the light of a brightly full moon. “Not many people have seen that, eh, skipper?” Kenny Nielson piped up on the intercom. Even Mac came out from behind his curtain to “take in the view.” “Almost as good as the Rockies,” he said and Kenny said, “Aye, but you haven’t seen the Rockies from above, have you?” and Keith started muttering something about the Blue Mountains until Teddy said, “OK, everyone,” before a full-blown discussion about the relative merits of the world’s mountain ranges took hold.
The odd bod had nothing to say about mountains. Teddy supposed they didn’t have many in Somerset. Apart from a few seaside holidays in Cornwall when they were children the south-west was not a part of the country that he had explored. If he survived the war, he thought, he would rather like to go on a grand tour of England, all the highways and byways, the hidden villages, the grand monuments, the meadows, moors and lakes. Everything they were fighting for.
They were “privileged,” Norman said, to see the world in a way that few people ever had. A privilege they were paying a terrible price for, Teddy thought.
They had been awestruck not only at the sight of the Alps by moonlight but by the depthless inky-black skies, pricked with thousands upon thousands of stars—bright seed broadcast by some generous god, Teddy thought, drifting dangerously close to the forsaken realm of poetry. There were sunsets and dawns of thrilling grandeur and once, on a run to Bochum, a spectacular show that the Northern Lights put on for them—a vibrating curtain of colours draped in the sky that had left them searching for superlatives.
In his isolated position at the back Kenny Nielson claimed that he had “the best seat in the house.” Sunsets in particular left him wonderstruck. From the tail of the aircraft he could see the sun going down long after the rest of the crew had flown into the darkness. “The sky’s on fire,” he reported excitedly one time after Teddy had lugged the Halifax off the runway and into the air. Teddy had a moment of terror—a vision of Armageddon being wreaked on them by the enemy—but then Vic Bennett in the mid-upper turret said, “That’s the best sunset I’ve ever seen.”
“Aye, like God’s painted the sky,” Kenny said, and Teddy said, “Can we have some peace and quiet?” relieved that the end of the world was not nigh and shocked at himself for having thought that it might be. “It is braw,” Kenny persisted, not quite able to let the beauty go. Or “Beauty” as Sylvie might have said.
As a rear-gunner, Kenny was the least likely of all of them to live to see a sunset in peacetime. Only a one-in-four chance of staying alive until then, Ursula’s girl said. In the end, of course, it was the girl from the Air Ministry who was living without a future, killed by the Aldwych V-1 rocket in June of ’44. She had been on the roof of Adastral House, where the Air Ministry was housed, sunbathing whilst eating her lunchtime sandwiches. (What were the odds against that, Teddy wondered?)
Other Air Ministry girls were sucked out of the shattered windows of the building and fell to their deaths in the street. One man was sliced in half by a sheet of falling glass, Ursula said. Teddy supposed for some people Ursula was a girl too—the girl from Civil Defence.
She was called Anne. The girl from the Air Ministry. And when they parted at the end of the evening they had spent in each other’s company at the Hammersmith Palais (she danced a neat foxtrot) she said to Teddy, “Well, good luck,” and didn’t look him in the eye.