‘It’s your classical education he doesn’t like,’ put in Colin.
‘I’ll make a list, shall I? Perhaps if I were taller or bigger or grew a moustache—’
‘He doesn’t like me much, either,’ Silver said with sympathy.
‘You both make him feel inferior,’ said Colin. ‘All that heady talk in the officers’ lounge comparing hydraulics to blood pressure. He can’t keep up.’
‘Hydraulics and blood pressure are endlessly fascinating,’ said Silver. He spread his chart on his knees, holding his electric torch ready in his gauntleted hand. He declared with satisfaction, ‘From tonight I shall always think of him as the Old Roundhead.’
My B-Flight aircrews knew what we were doing that night – three planes in my own Pimms Section and three in Madeira Section, with three men in each plane. In a few minutes I’d be in the sky in the dark in charge of eighteen men, counting myself, and in a few hours half of them would be dead.
I didn’t know then what the full toll of that night would be, and I tried to lighten the tone as we set out. I called over the radio to Pimms and Madeira as we took off. ‘Setting course for target and climbing to twenty thousand feet, as per orders from the Old Roundhead.’
Over the intercom I heard Colin behind me laughing again.
‘The Old Roundhead might be keeping a listening watch,’ Silver warned me.
‘I don’t mind. I’ll get another damned reprimand. He already knows what I think of him.’
We flew obediently high, heading for a flotilla of German warships that was supposed to be cruising fifty miles off the Norwegian coast. After about an hour and a half, maybe we were over the ships we were supposed to hit and maybe we weren’t. The sky was clear and blue-black, but the half-moon lit the thin cloud below us like a sheet of milky Chinese silk. I could see the other B-Flight planes standing out in black silhouette like decals against that cloud.
So, too, could the German Messerschmitt 110 night fighters on patrol.
We didn’t have lights and neither did they, and we didn’t see them coming. They can fly a hundred miles an hour faster than we can. But Silver and I both saw the streaks of green flame as the tracers flew from the first rounds of their thundering guns. And we saw the explosion of golden fire as the bullets struck an engine on another Blenheim in our formation.
Silver opened the observer’s panel in the window next to his head and twisted around to stick his nose out so he could see behind us. ‘There’s one on our tail!’ he cried. ‘Dive, dive—’
‘Down, everybody get down!’ I called to my lads over the radio. ‘Use the cloud! Get into it or below it where they can’t see you! Drop your bombs if you have to, lose the weight—’
I pushed my own plane into a nosedive. Our only hope against an Me-110 was to get away from it. Hide in cloud, camouflage yourself against the earth’s surface. For a moment, behind me, I could hear Colin’s gun rattling back at our attackers.
In a Blenheim, the air gunner has to sit with his head up out of the plane in a bubble of Perspex like a goldfish bowl on a window sill. The gunner’s turret is often the first thing that goes when the Jerries are after you. And that’s exactly what happened that night, with a deafening bang that I felt more than heard. God. The wind in the cockpit, after our turret exploded, howling around us as we sped towards the black sea below. The mess of blood and bone that had been Colin, all over the inside of the plane and the back of Silver’s leather helmet.
That missed me, anyway – I was protected from Colin by the bulkhead between the pilot’s seat and the radio equipment.
The sky went small and grey. I was diving too fast – in another few seconds the increased gravity would knock us out.
I must have levelled up somehow.
I skimmed so low over the sea, when I reached it, that the poor Blenheim’s tail wheel snagged in a swell and snapped off.
In front of us, seawater erupted like a geyser as someone overhead got rid of their explosives, and I was too close to the surface to turn away from the pluming waterspout. I had to fly through it. We lost windowpanes in the front cockpit and Silver’s charts were soaked, but we were still flying on the other side.
We were being bombed by our own planes.
We saw two Blenheims go plummeting in flames into the water around us while we struggled away from the waves.
It was the morning of 7 November 1940, and I was so stunned and spent after I landed back at our base in Shetland that I couldn’t think. I shut down the engines, and Silver and I sat in silence. We didn’t even try to get out.
Then a couple of mechanics climbed on the wing to open the hatches, and Silver looked up. He put a hand on my shoulder and said softly, ‘Nice flying, Scotty, as per usual. Thanks for getting us home.’
He’d taken off his gloves to rescue the charts and to use the pencils and flight calculator on the way back. His hands must have been freezing. But he made the same cheesy joke every time we landed safely – he’d be able to play the violin again. He pulled the little box of rosin from his knee pocket, the lucky charm that went with him on every op, and held it between thumb and forefinger with both hands in front of his face.
‘Look, everything still in one piece.’
He couldn’t not say it. He couldn’t not take the rosin with him. I had a charm too, in the breast pocket of my uniform beneath my flight suit, a perfectly round quartz pebble from the Iron Age hill fort on my father’s grouse moor.
‘You’re welcome,’ I croaked.
Our clothes were soaked with seawater and Colin Oldham’s blood. It was all over the cockpit, and we had to climb through it to get out the hatch.
Half an hour later I sat down in front of Flight Officer Phyllis Pennyworth, our brisk, chirpy robin of a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force interrogator who was in charge of grilling us after a mission – and I got so choked up I couldn’t talk. I sat for a while with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and she just let me do that, didn’t say anything, knew what was coming – or guessed, anyway.
When I looked up, the pretty pink had faded a bit from her rosy cheeks. She loved us all very much. But in the debriefing room Pennyworth took care to be all business, and this time I was too broken and beat to do my job politely.
‘Too many German planes to count,’ I told her. ‘Bloody Jerries in their bloody Messerschmitt 110s. Those Luftwaffe night fighters. Like a swarm of hornets – they know where we’re coming from and what we’re after, and they’re a million miles an hour faster than us—’
‘Not a million, Scotty,’ Phyllis corrected me gently. Using my nickname instead of my rank title the way most of my lads did, so that I knew she cared, but reminding me to be precise so she could make an accurate report. She was a stickler for rules herself, and she was scared of the Old Roundhead.
‘Might as well be a million.’ It came out as a sort of sob. ‘These old Blenheims we fly, these airborne buckets of bolts we’re in, these crates don’t have a chance against a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter!’
And I gave a real sob then, because of Colin.
I didn’t tell Phyllis Pennyworth about the mess. She’d seen our busted-up plane – half the glass in the front cockpit punched out, a furrow ploughed in the airfield behind us by our tail because we’d lost the tail wheel, the gaping hole where the gunner’s turret used to be. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what had happened to Colin. She waited while I tried to pull myself together, and when I still didn’t say anything, she sighed and put down her pen and lit a cigarette for me.