All they wanted was sleep and the journey back seemed interminable. Even when they arrived back they still had to go through the usual routine of reporting to an intelligence officer. They were grey with fatigue, their faces still creased from their oxygen masks, almost deaf from the din of J-Jig’s engines. Teddy had a pounding headache, which was usual at the end of a trip.
It was almost lunchtime by then, although they were still awarded their customary mugs of tea laced with tots of rum and the chaplain did the rounds with cigarettes and biscuits and said, “Good to see you back, boys.” The ground crew had waited up for them until they heard from Scampton that they were safe and the CO hadn’t been to sleep at all and sat in on their debriefing with the intelligence officer. They were his longest-serving crew and he was paternally fond of them. Turin had been their twenty-eighth op.
They had landed without the odd bod. They worked out that he must have bailed out pretty sharpish when Teddy first ordered them to abandon J-Jig. That had been over France. Hadn’t it? Or over the North Sea. Teddy was so tired he could barely remember his own name, let alone the finer details of the harrowing return. He certainly couldn’t remember the odd bod’s name.
“Fred, I think,” George Carr said. “Frank,” according to Norman. “Definitely something beginning with an ‘F,’ ” they agreed and the intelligence officer had to riffle through her paperwork before saying, “An ‘H’ actually. Harold Wilkinson.”
“Close,” George Carr said.
Mac had no memory at all of the anoxia, said he didn’t even know the words to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” although they never stopped singing it to him on the crew binge that followed Turin. They had forty-eight hours’ leave and they slept for half of that and then got blind drunk in Bettys Bar in York for the other half.
After the war, a long time after the war, Teddy did a bit of investigating to see if he could find out what happened to the odd bod. There were no reports of him parachuting successfully, of evading or of being taken prisoner. He was one of the missing and eventually his name appeared on the Runnymede memorial for the men who had no known grave, where he was remembered as Harold Wilkinson, not “the odd bod.” “Silly clot,” Vic Bennett said. “He should have had more faith in his pilot, shouldn’t he? Can’t believe I missed the excitement.”
They weren’t as late returning as the crew of A-Able, who had been on the same raid as them to Turin but had diverted on the way home to Algiers when two of their engines were knocked out. They had been posted as officially missing by the time they got back to the station. Their Halifax, much to everyone’s delight, was loaded down with crates of oranges, which were distributed around the squadron, some going to the local primary school. Teddy ate his orange very slowly, savouring every segment and thinking about hot slices of Mediterranean sun he never expected to see again. He didn’t. After the war Teddy never went abroad again, never took a foreign holiday, never stepped on board a modern aircraft or took a boat on the sea. Viola told him that this “isolationist policy” was “pathetic” and he said it wasn’t a policy, it was just the way things had happened. Nor was it “jingoistic” and “xenophobic”—another two words in her arsenal. She accused him of having “no sense of adventure,” and he thought that the war had provided enough “adventure” for several lifetimes and a man could nurture himself just as well in his own garden. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” he said to her, but she had never heard of Candide. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard of Voltaire.
Bomb doors open, skipper.”
“OK, bomb-aimer.”
“Steady, skipper. Left. Left. Steady. Right a bit. Steady, steady. Bombs gone.”