Where was their second dickey, you might be wondering? Guy. No one could remember seeing him after they had been attacked by the fighter and for a while there was much discussion in the dinghy about what might have happened to him. In the end they concluded that he had not simply disappeared into thin air but must have fallen, unseen and unheard, through the hole in the fuselage when they corkscrewed and had plummeted into the North Sea without a parachute.
Another large fateful wave hit them like concrete. They hung on as best they could, but both Vic and Kenny were tipped into the water. Teddy never knew how they had the strength to retrieve a terrified Kenny (“Because he was a runt,” Keith said later), yet retrieve him they did. But no matter how many times they tried to heave the dead weight of Vic back on to the dinghy he would slip back into the water. It was a hopeless task, they were simply too weak. They managed to loop one of his arms through the dinghy’s ropes, but Teddy didn’t see how he could last more than a few minutes in the water.
Teddy took up the position closest to Vic and was still trying to hang on to him when he rolled his head back and looked Teddy in the eyes and Teddy knew there was no fight left in him. “Well, good luck to you then,” Vic whispered and let his arm slip out of the dinghy rope. He floated away, just a few yards, and then disappeared quietly beneath the waves and into his unknown grave.
George Carr was not dead, as Teddy had feared, but he died two days later in hospital, of “shock and immersion,” which Teddy supposed meant the cold.
They were found by chance by a Royal Navy boat that had been hunting for another downed aircraft. They were lugged on board and stripped of their clothing and given hot tea and rum and cigarettes, and then wrapped in blankets and laid tenderly in bunks, like babies. Teddy immediately fell into the deepest sleep he had ever known, and when he was woken an hour or so later with yet more hot tea and rum he wished that he could have been left asleep in that bunk for ever.
They spent a night in hospital in Grimsby and then caught the train back to their squadron. Except for George, of course, who was retrieved by his family and buried back in Burnley.
They were given several days’ leave, but there was still the question of Kenny’s missing thirtieth op. None of them could believe that after everything they had gone through he would still be expected to officially finish his tour, but the CO, who they knew to be a kindly man, said “his hands were tied.”
So, only a week after they had been pulled like half-drowned kittens from the deep, they found themselves sitting on the runway waiting for the signal for take-off. The remaining crew—Teddy, Mac, Norman and Keith, all tour-expired—had volunteered to go up again with Kenny for one last raid. He cried when they told him and Keith said, “You soft little bugger.”
It was a reckless, cavalier kind of affair. For some reason they felt “proofed” by the ditching, as if nothing bad could happen to them, which, as the girl from the Air Ministry could have told them, was simply not the case. This was despite the fact that all the signs and portents were bad. (Perhaps Keith’s widdershins luck was at work.) They had borrowed an aircraft from another crew and took up two other men needing to make up sorties, on the principle that they were all odd bods on this trip. They even took a second dickey with them, although the second dickey wasn’t a new pilot getting experience but their own CO, who “felt like” going up. Teddy expected they might be given a gentle ride by him—a nickel op, perhaps, to drop leaflets on France—but no, they went to the Big City on a maximum-effort raid. They were all infected by a kind of madness and were ridiculously high-spirited, like boys setting out on a Scouts’ expedition.
They weaved their way to Berlin and back untouched by flak and didn’t even encounter a fighter. They were one of the first aircraft to land back at the squadron. Kenny climbed out of the aircraft and kissed the concrete of the runway. They all shook hands and the CO said, “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it, lads?” He shouldn’t have said that. He flew on the fateful raid to Nuremberg and Teddy heard afterwards that he never came back.
Lillian was quite clearly in the family way, wearing an old printed smock already stretching at the seams. She looked weary, dark circles beneath her eyes and veins standing out on her skinny legs. No blooming here, Teddy thought. It was hard to believe that this was the same Lil of the red satin unmentionables. Look where they had got her.
“We had a wake instead of a wedding,” Mrs. Bennett said. “Sit down, Lil, take the weight off your feet.” Lillian sat obediently while Mrs. Bennett made a pot of tea.
“I’ve never been to Canvey Island before,” Teddy said, and Vic’s mother said, “Why should you have?” Vic had inherited his bad teeth from her, Teddy noticed. “He didn’t say anything about the baby,” Teddy said and Mrs. Bennett said, “Why should he have?” and Lillian raised an eyebrow and smiled at Teddy. “Born out of wedlock,” Vic’s mother said, pouring tea from a big tin pot. She was an odd mixture of disapproval and comfort.
“Won’t be the first, won’t be the last,” Lillian said. “He left a letter,” she said to Teddy. “They all do, you know.”