I'll Be Seeing You (18 page)

An escort of Thunderbolts showed up to keep a friendly eye on them but as soon as the fighters' fuel got low they had to quit, and the minute they did, the unfriendly German version appeared like bats out of hell – Focke-Wulfs and 109s.

‘Pilot to crew. Six fighters coming in eleven o'clock high. Go for 'em, Turret.'

The German fighters picked on a straggling Fort and raked it with fire. Hamilton saw it blow up into bits. No parachutes – just fragments spinning towards the earth. His gunners were firing away like crazy, peppering the sky. So were all the other Forts.

‘Got one at four o'clock,' Alvin yelled from the tail.

The bandits were coming in from all angles, in waves of thirty or more each time, spitting fire and flashing past.

‘Ball to crew – more of the sonofabitches comin' up at us from below.'

He could hear Milo's guns chattering away furiously down in the ball, though he couldn't see what the hell was going on under the plane. Another Fort, ahead of them, suddenly burst into flames, and, soon after, another began the long, steep fall downwards, streaming black smoke. One, two, three, four, five chutes out of that one . . . no more after that. The Fort on their right wing was next: one moment it was there wallowing alongside, the next it was gone. The Fort behind slid forward to take its place in the formation. More fighters swept in from ten o'clock, aiming straight at the nose, before rolling away. The top turrets missed but his bombardier clobbered one of the bastards and he watched a wing break off and the German pilot bail out. No time for cheering. His fingers were gripping the wheel, tight as a vice.

‘Ball to crew – two fighters six o'clock low.'

Miss Laid
lurched and shuddered and he knew they'd been hit.

‘Pilot to crew. What's the damage?'

‘Right Waist to pilot. There's two bloody great holes back here. Shell went clean between us an' out the other side. Boy, were we lucky.'

‘Pilot to Ball. OK down there, Milo?'

No answer.

‘Pilot to Waist. Check on him, soon as you can.'

The fighters vanished as suddenly as they'd arrived.

‘Tail to crew – flak at eight o'clock level.'

Instead of the fighters, there was a curtain of flak ahead that they had to fly through, praying hard. Tight formation was no defence against flak; it just made it easier to collide. Pretty soon
Miss Laid
started plunging about like a frightened mare.

‘Bombardier to pilot. We're on the bomb run.'

‘OK. Go ahead.'

They went onto the target and got the hell out again. What was left of the formation turned for home. No more enemy fighters on the way back, which was the good news. The bad news was that Milo had been wounded. They'd got him up out of the ball turret, staunched the bleeding and given him a shot of morphine and wrapped him in blankets.

The Thunderbolts showed up again to escort them for the last bit, after all the damage had been done. When they flew in over the coast of England, the sun was still shining and the idyllic country scene was still there as they came back to Halfpenny Green – cottages and woods, and fields of ripe wheat, another one harvested since they'd left that morning. He sent the wounded-on-board red flare and got priority. With Milo in mind, he brought
Miss Laid
down as gently as he knew how to land her. An ambulance was there as soon as they came to a stop. He waited while they carried the barely conscious ball-turret gunner out on a stretcher. Hamilton touched his shoulder.

‘You're OK now, Milo. They'll take good care of you. You'll be fine.'

He stayed as the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance, the doors banged shut. Beside him, Gene said, ‘Reckon he's going to make it?'

‘Doesn't look too good.'

The crew chief, Deerfield, came up. ‘Any other damage to report, Lieutenant? Aside from the obvious?'

He shook his head. ‘Controls still seem to work OK – far as I could tell.'

‘We'll check 'em out real good.'

They took the truck over to Operations for interrogation. Hot coffee and spam sandwiches in the waiting room, the surviving crews swopping accounts, asking after missing buddies. The CO was there too, patting backs and boosting morale. In the interrogation room, the WAAF was sitting quietly at her table with the RAF liaison officer. She spotted him as soon as he came in and she smiled right across the room before he even got near her table. He knew she must have been on the lookout, waiting to see if he was one of the lucky ones who'd made it. He thought, forget Lola and the rest of them back home, and all the others over here. She's the one I want.

When the interrogation was over – a long-drawn-out inquisition on every detail of the mission: fighters, flak, shootings-down on both sides, any new enemy tricks – exhaustion took a hold. Instead of going to the mess hall he went to the hut and fell into the sack. Within a couple of minutes he was asleep.

It was evening when he woke up – one of those long English summer evenings when the light turns to gold and takes hours to fade away. He got up, took a shower, put on clean clothes and went by the enlisted men's hut to see how his gunners were doing. They were still asleep, humped shapes under the blankets. The last bed in the row was tucked in neat and tidy and very empty. He rode his bike over to the base hospital and found a nurse in the corridor.

‘What's the news on Sergeant Gambi?'

‘Was he in your crew?'

‘My ball-turret gunner. How is he?'

‘I'm so sorry, Lieutenant,' she said. ‘He died about an hour ago.'

Before the Americans had arrived, the Boot Record in the Mad Monk had been held by the RAF. Flight Lieutenant Johnnie Rivers had drunk the pub's glass boot of beer in the shortest time of fifty-nine seconds and his name, along with the closest contenders, was still chalked up on a slate beside the bar. So far no Yank had beaten it, though not for want of trying.

When Daisy walked in with Sandy Dimmock another attempt was being made. The American lieutenant took one minute, twenty-three seconds to do it, to deafening encouragement.

‘They're getting closer,' the flight lieutenant said gloomily. ‘Is nothing sacrosanct?'

She smiled. ‘Maybe that's one record we shouldn't mind losing.'

The Yanks were in a mood that she knew well: the sort of mood that always followed a string of bad ops. The RAF had been just the same. The ridiculous boot game, the name-carving, the hand-imprinting and smoke-writing on the pub ceiling, the wild sing-songs round the piano were all born of the desperate need to blot out reality. She'd seen the RAF boys falling around in the bar, drunk and incapable, sometimes weeping while they laughed, and yet the next day they always surfaced bright-eyed, perfectly normal and ready for the next op. It had been bad for the Americans – very bad. They'd lost a lot of planes and a lot of men in the past few weeks. And they needed to forget. One of them went over to the upright piano in the corner and began to play, fast and furiously. Presently, others gathered round him and began to sing – Yanks with their arms round girls, all yelling away together, the old locals watching from their benches with their beer mugs in their hands and toothless grins on their faces.

It had been easier to deal with when they hadn't been so nice, when they'd been so pleased with themselves and so dismissive of the RAF, when she hadn't really cared all that much what happened to them. Now, it was just as heart-breaking as it had been before.

Some more Yanks came in, and she saw Lieutenant Hamilton with his co-pilot.

He'd elbowed a way through the crowd and appeared at her side. ‘Hi, there.'

‘Hallo.' She managed to make it sound casual. On every one of the last few missions, she'd convinced herself that he'd got the chop.

‘How's your drink?'

‘It's fine, thanks.'

‘Don't go away while I get mine.'

By the time he came back, some other Yanks had moved in on her and it was a group. The singing went on, louder still. ‘Roll me over' finally petered out after many bawdy verses and ‘Tipperary' started. After that, it was ‘Pack up your Troubles' and then ‘Roll out the Barrel' – all songs learned from the British.

He said in her ear, ‘Let's get out of here.'

She went and found Sandy to tell him.

‘Are you OK,' he said, ‘or do you need rescuing?'

‘No. Not from this one.'

They sat on a bench outside the pub, overlooking the green – cricket pavilion, duck pond, the encircling houses, all still visible in the twilight.

‘Why the Mad Monk?' he asked.

‘Nobody seems to know. There's a ruined abbey near here. He was probably from there.'

‘I guess he was some crazy old guy who wandered in and out for a pint, now and then. Maybe the beer was better in those days.'

‘I think it would have been mead.'

‘Mead?'

‘A sort of early beer.'

‘Never tried that.' He looked away, across the green. ‘It sure is peaceful here. Hard to believe there's a war on. Too bad it's true.'

She said quietly, ‘I heard about your ball-turret gunner, Ham. I'm terribly sorry.'

‘Yep. Too bad. He was a good guy. But that's the way it goes. Cigarette?'

They were getting more and more like the RAF in every way, she thought. Little or nothing said about those who bought it. Not callous. The only way to play the game.

He lit the cigarette for her with one of those heavy American lighters with a hinged lid that snapped shut like a trap. ‘Sorry, hauling you out here. I wasn't in a singing mood.'

‘You need to be half-drunk to sing those songs.'

‘I guess so. And they had a head start on me.' After a moment, he said, ‘You know, I really don't know anything much about you – except that you're called Daisy and you come from a London suburb. That right?'

‘That's right.'

‘OK. Tell me some more.'

‘Such as?'

‘Your family. How many brothers and sisters?'

‘No brothers. I have four sisters, all older. Lily, Violet, Primrose and Iris.'

‘And you're Daisy. All flowers. That's kind of nice.'

‘Our mother's a very keen gardener. Actually, my real name's Marguerite, but nobody calls me that.'

‘I like 'em both,' he said. ‘But Daisy suits you best. Little and lovely. And you're the youngest. Nineteen or twenty, I'd guess.'

‘Twenty.'

‘I'm an old man of twenty-two. And my real name's Howard, but nobody here calls me that either. What made you join the air force?'

‘Well, I already had two sisters in the navy, and one in the Land Army, and the other's a FANY, so I thought I'd do something different.'

He laughed. It was the first time she'd seen him do that. ‘A fanny? No kidding! I guess that doesn't mean the same over here.'

‘It stands for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Primrose drives ambulances in London. She drove them all through the Blitz.'

‘Did they send you out of London – during the Blitz?'

‘Heavens, no! My mother wouldn't have considered it, and nor would I. Anyway, it wasn't too bad where we were.'

He drew on his cigarette, flicked the ash away. ‘We think a hell of a lot of you British, you know, Daisy – the way you stuck it out on your own specially now we've seen something of what it's been like for ourselves. It's a beautiful country and it's a great country. And I'm sorry we didn't get here sooner.'

‘Well, you're here now.'

He nodded. ‘When it all started in '39 I wanted to join the RAF – there were guys doing that. Going to Canada and pretending to be Canadians and getting trained and sent over. Only my parents kicked up a hell of a fuss. I was eighteen and I'd just started at Berkeley so I guess they had a point. But after Pearl Harbor nothing would have stopped me.'

‘Berkeley?'

‘A college in northern California. University. I'll still have a year to do if I get back.'

She noted the
if
.

‘Well, I'd already learned to fly before the war and I was used to flying my father's plane around, so it made good sense. Except I'd planned on flying fighters, not bombers.'

‘Wouldn't they let you?'

‘Too tall and they needed bomber pilots. Strong guys who could heave a big plane around. It takes some muscle to keep in formation for hours on end. I reckon I could arm-wrestle Joe Louis now – specially with my left.' He flexed the arm. ‘That's the one gets to do most of the work – the steering.'

‘You must get awfully tired on ops.' She knew they did – she'd seen the grey faces and the dark circles under the eyes when they came back.

‘Sure do. All of us. But we get over it fast. Sleep in our cots like babies.' He flicked his cigarette again. ‘I wish I'd more time to go see more of the countryside – down on the ground. I'd like to do some more sketching while I'm over here.'