Behind the Scenes at the Museum (31 page)

As for Rags – Bunty had given him to the RSPCA on St George’s Field and he was still there when we came back from holiday, unwanted and about to go to the electric chamber. Patricia bought him back with her pocket-money and the last thing she said to me on the morning she left home was, ‘You’ll look after Rags, won’t you, Ruby?’ and I did, believe me, I did.

He wasn’t alone. The crew of D for Dog had a bad feeling about this flight. Yesterday one of the armourers had made a careless mistake and a trolley of bombs had blown a crater in the runway, taking a Halifax and half its crew with it. And now Taffy Jones, the flight engineer, had left behind the tarnished, bent St Christopher that they always fixed dangling from the perspex canopy and everyone had cursed him blackly on take-off. Wally Whitton told them to shut up and said scathingly they were a load of bloody foreigners because, apart from Taffy, a Welshman, naturally, D for Dog also had a Jock – Mac McKendrick, as rear-gunner and a Canuck – Edmund, for a bomb-aimer. ‘Shove off, you Brummy prick,’ Len Toft said amiably, and Jonty Patterson, their twenty-two-year-old pilot, flinched. This was only Patterson’s second op as pilot of D for Dog – their previous pilot had whiplashed his neck in a wheels-up landing – and he was ill at ease with his experienced crew, some of whom, like Taffy Jones, were well into their second tour and could probably fly the plane better than he could. He never knew when they were joking and felt oddly ashamed of his public school education and ringing vowels. Only his sweet-tempered bomb-aimer treated him the same as everyone else.

Privately, his crew were more worried by their new pilot’s flying skills than his social background. He was ‘bloody useless in cloud’ as Wally Whitton put it succinctly, a fact they’d discovered over Holland on their first trip with him and Taffy had to take the controls as they rocked and bounced through a big dollop of cumulo-nimbus – making their poor boy-pilot, who still only shaved once a week, go pink with shame.

When Wally Whitton made his cheerful xenophobic jibe noone added that they’d been even more foreign until last week when Sergeant Ray Smith, their Aussie gunner in the mid-upper turret and a mild, cynical chap, had been blasted by gunfire from a Bf-109. The new gunner, Morris Dighty, a van driver from Keighley, was as nervous as a kitten. They could feel his jumpiness creeping down, spreading through the fuselage like a clammy fog.

‘Well, our luck’s run out,’ Mac said miserably after they hauled the splintered Sergeant Smith out of his turret, because Mac and Edmund and the Aussie had chalked up eleven flights together and it had been one of the reasons why Edmund had resisted leaving this mixed bag and transferring to the Royal Canadian Air Force.

‘We’re on borrowed time now, Ed,’ Mac muttered behind him as they did his pre-flight checks and Edmund cheerfully told him to go to hell. ‘How was that nurse, Ed?’ Taffy asked suddenly over the intercom and Wally Whitton swore hugely at him to ‘Get off the effing intercom’ and Edmund smiled to himself over the glassy, moonlit sea because ‘that nurse’ was OK. Doreen O’Doherty – sweet as maple syrup, with her big brown eyes that made Edmund think unkindly of a cow and her curly brown hair and her strangled Irish accent. Half the time he couldn’t understand a word she was saying but she was softly accommodating, stumbling out with him from Betty’s Bar and down to the blacked-out river, blacker than the North Sea, where she tasted like marzipan and felt like liquid caramel and whispered,
Oh, Eddie, you’re wonderful, so you are
—

‘Corkscrew starboard, go, go, go!’ a voice – Mac’s – screamed over the intercom and the heavy Halifax immediately dropped three hundred feet in the darkness and rolled and dropped again and then accelerated upwards to port and Edmund, from his bird’s-eye position, could see a spurt of red tracer fire falling away into nothing. It was several seconds before anyone said anything, then Mac’s voice says calmly, ‘I think we lost him,’ and Morris Dighty began to jabber incomprehensibly until they all told him to ‘stow it’.

The solid density of the Dutch coast passed below them and they had no time to relax after their encounter with the Messerschmitt because now they had to be as alert as cats for the coastal defences. All remained dark and hushed around them as the big four-engined plane droned on like a grotesquely heavy insect. Although there were another four hundred planes on this stooge to bomb Krupps at Essen, D for Dog seemed to be the only plane up in the star-filled sky. And then, from nowhere, they were suddenly fingered by a blinding white light as a huge searchlight beam reached out from nowhere and grabbed them.

Dazzled, Edmund clambered out from the nose and swung himself up and hung on behind Taffy and Jonty Patterson. If there was one thing that made you feel more vulnerable than being trapped in a searchlight beam, it was being flat on your belly with your head poking into it. The beam was joined by others – up in his turret, Mac was keeping count of them, in a horrified kind of times-table – ‘Thirty, thirty-five, thirty-nine, Jesus, forty-two, another five, Jeeesus!’ and the voice of the normally affable Len Toft was yelling, ‘Dive down it, Jesus, dive down it, you berk!’ and there was another, fainter noise of someone being sick into their face-mask, which Edmund was sure would be Morris Dighty. Edmund looked behind him and could see, in the unnatural white of the searchlight, the faces of Len Toft and Wally Whitton, frozen like small animals of prey. Jonty Patterson came to life suddenly, screwing his eyes up against the light, and started a textbook pattern of evasive tactics – starboard climb, port dive, dive, dive, climb – diving more than climbing to keep the speed up in a desperate attempt to get into a part of the sky where the flak battery crew couldn’t find them – for all the while the flak was coming up,
crump, whoosh, crump
,
whoosh
and occasionally a great thudding noise against the fuselage – and then suddenly, miraculously, they were out of the deadly light and back under the cover of night.

When Edmund looked at Jonty Patterson he could see him peering through the windscreen, his knuckles white from clutching hard on the controls and pearly beads of sweat stood out on his blanched face. ‘Well done, skip,’ a voice said over the intercom, too high-pitched with relief to be recognizable.

Wally Whitton’s curtain flicked back as Edmund crawled into the back of the fuselage. ‘Get us a coffee, Ed,’ he said wearily. Edmund poured coffee for both of them and while Wally swallowed a Benzedrine, Edmund ate his way through a corned beef sandwich and returned to prone position in the nose. He wanted to think about home, about the farm in Saskatchewan. After he’d taken his English degree in Toronto he’d thought about staying in the city, maybe teaching or getting a job in journalism, but then the war had happened and now he thought it was funny because he would be willing to make any Faustian pact going if he could just go home again, go home again and lead a quiet life, work on the farm with his brother Nat, marry, raise children. If he ever had a wife he’d like her to be like his mother, strong and adventurous and pretty – not that he was likely to have a wife; he was pretty sure Mac was right, their luck had been used up. Edmund tried to imagine taking a girl like Doreen O’Doherty home with him – or perhaps one of his English cousins. What would Bunty be like if he took her to Canada, to the prairies that rolled on farther than the North Sea?

Edmund adjusted his bomb sight. ‘Approaching the target now,’ Wally Whitton’s voice said in his ear. Light flak tracer was spraying everywhere in threads of red and orange and yellow like seaside lights. Searchlights were raking the sky and Edmund could see what looked like a Stirling, trapped in one of the beams. The Stirling couldn’t escape its tormentor and a few seconds later it suddenly exploded into a bright red ball of fire that turned to pink and then finally to nothing.

There was a sea of light flak, tracer fire
zip-zipping
past D for Dog and Taffy Jones said, ‘You need more height, skip,’ although nothing would get them out of the way of heavier flak when it started coming up. Edmund could see Pathfinder flares burning below and a few incendiaries burning but mostly the target was covered in billowing smoke. ‘Right, right, steady – right a bit, steady, left, left – steady—’ It looked like they’d have to go round again. ‘Sod,’ someone said quietly over the intercom and then they were in the heavy flak.
Crump, crack!
A shell exploded near them and the whole aircraft yawned to port as if somebody had punched it through the sky and Edmund pressed the bomb tit and said, ‘Bombs gone,’ even though they had completely lost the target. He’d never done that before. He could hear the starboard engine vibrating obscenely and the big Halifax started bucking in the air. ‘Well, so much for the photograph,’ Willy Whitton said sarcastically and there was another enormous thud against the plane. ‘What the hell was that?’ Len Toft shouted and then metal splinters tore through the plane as a shell came up through the nose and missed Edmund by an inch before embedding its remaining shards in the lap of the flight engineer, Taffy Jones.

Another shell exploded near D for Dog making the plane bounce and Edmund was thrown forward into the nose through which freezing cold air was streaming. He had a sudden unsettling glimpse of land through the hole and scrabbled to pull himself away and into the cockpit. The smell of cordite hung everywhere and the plane was being buffeted around like a toy. ‘Christ,’ he said quietly when he saw Taffy Jones, shaking all over but staring blankly at the windscreen, pink bubbles frothing into his face mask; then the plane lurched into a dive just as a voice said, ‘Help me,’ and for a moment Edmund thought it was Taffy before realizing it was Jonty Patterson, half his face torn away by shell splinters so that he was speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a poor ventriloquist. ‘I’ll get the morphine,’ Edmund said, but Jonty Patterson mumbled, ‘No, no help me get her up.’ It took the combined weight of both of them pulling back on the control column to get the plane out of the dive. By now D for Dog was vibrating along her whole length, juddering and shaking like Taffy Jones had been. Now, when Edmund looked across at him, he could see he was slumped, glassy-eyed.

On the intercom, Edmund heard Morris Dighty shouting, ‘Baling out!’ and at the same time Len Toft’s voice saying, ‘Sergeant Whitton’s dead – and there’s a great big bloody hole back here that he fell out of.’ The starboard engine was whining malevolently and Jonty muttered, ‘Turn it off,’ with the good side of his face. Edmund tried to contact Mac in the tail but there was no answer. Len Toft appeared behind him. ‘Christ,’ he said when he saw Jonty Patterson’s face and, ‘Christ,’ again when he saw the state of Taffy Jones. ‘I think he’s dead,’ Edmund said. ‘Can we get him out of here?’

‘Let’s just bloody bale out,’ Len Toft said, and Edmund saw that he already had his parachute clipped on. The port engine was sounding rough now and the whole plane seemed to be trying to rattle itself to pieces. Mac’s voice came suddenly over the intercom, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’

‘Where’ve you been?’ Edmund said. ‘The intercom went dud.’ ‘Bale out,’ Jonty Patterson said. He was gripping the central column and staring straight ahead; his lop-sided face looked ghoulish. There was blood on his legs as well and it suddenly struck Edmund that the boy was dying but when he reached out to touch him, Jonty Patterson just mumbled, ‘Bale out.’ Mac’s voice came over the intercom, surreally calm, ‘Can’t bale out, my chute’s shot to pieces.’

‘Come forward, Mac!’ Edmund shouted as the plane started to pitch into a dive. Jonty Patterson was fighting the controls but when Edmund looked back he could see that a hole had been blown through the side of the fuselage. ‘I’m going,’ Len Toft said, struggling towards the escape hatch. Mac made his way gingerly to the front of the plane. ‘The port engine’s on fire, and there’s a hole big enough to put Wales in,’ he said and then, ‘Bloody hell, skip – what happened to you?’ when he saw the shredded face of the pilot. ‘Bale out,’ Jonty Patterson said again. ‘What about you, skip?’ Edmund asked, clipping on his parachute. ‘I can’t move my legs – just bloody bale out, will you?’ Jonty Patterson muttered and for the first time he suddenly seemed very grown-up.

‘We’re not leaving you.’ Edmund had to shout now to be heard over the roaring noise of the plane. ‘Come on,’ Mac said, moving towards the escape hatch. ‘He can have the posthumous medal; we can make it on one parachute, it’s been done before.’ The plane was diving steeply now and yellow flames were licking the inside of the fuselage. They had to fight against the centrifugal force that was trying to glue them into D for Dog. They heaved the upper half of their bodies out of the hatch and were immediately slammed by the wind so that they couldn’t breathe. Edmund didn’t think they would be able to get out and even if they did he didn’t think they’d manage to fall free of the plane’s superstructure. If the wind had allowed him to look aft he would have found no encouragement – there, Len Toft, or what remained of him, was entangled in his parachute, wrapped around the tail section. Nor did they register that the plane was now ablaze along the length of its wings or see the starboard ailerons hanging in rags. But they did know when the starboard engine suddenly tore away from the wing, because the dying plane tipped to one side and chuted Edmund and Mac McKendrick out of the hatch.

They fell, clinging to each other like face-to-face Siamese twins, and as they fell down the burning port wing a jagged piece of metal caught Edmund and ripped at his arm. The earth was coming up to meet them with unbelievable speed. The thick snow on the fields and the bright moon made everything as clear as daylight. In a panic Edmund yanked on the cord release with his good arm, but it meant he was no longer hugging Mac to his body and when the parachute canopy jerked them, Mac’s arms were dislodged from around Edmund’s neck and he fell soundlessly to earth, his arms and legs spread like a starfish as he plummeted.