Lost in the Flames (12 page)

At four o’clock they gathered in the briefing room, sitting together near the back as the other crews filed into the room and filled it with their nervous chatter. Jacob looked around the room as it began to fill, the bearing of the men differing according to the number of operations they had flown. He recognised another sprog crew three rows in front, sitting in a line, six men and their skipper, not saying a word except to offer each other cigarettes and to share a match as it burnt down to nothing. The senior crews had a different air about them, a casual worn-out intimacy with the danger of their lives that they carried in the way they walked and the detached ambivalence of their eyes, the sad eyes of foxhounds who have done it all before and are going to do it again, and again and again, until they exhaust themselves and are put out of their misery. They had seen the briefings and the take-off and the hell of the target and the long exhausted trawl home through skies still
punctuated with flak and fighters, the strung-out waiting for a landing slot and the coming down through murk, the debriefing with the hot mugs of tea laced with rum, and the cold-fish eyes of the intelligence officers, and the long wait for comrades who were already dead.

An intelligence officer strode into the room and the doors slammed shut behind him with a noise like a bomb going off, followed by the ack-ack clip of his heels across the wooden floor. He leapt up onto the dais at the front as if he was about to burst into song. He had performed on the stage in his teens, the lead role in a school production of Hamlet, skull in hand, and it occurred to him that he had a room full of them now, pale grey sweating things, so much grey meat, like pork that had been left out too long, smelling already of decay. ‘Better that they’re consumed when fresh,’ he found himself thinking, ‘before they start to rot with fear.’ He admonished himself inwardly for what his mind had allowed him to think and then he stiffened and the skulls fell quiet as he coughed them into silence.

‘The target for tonight, gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘is Cologne.’

A rustle of noise spread across the room like the whispering of summer rain on broad-leaved trees. Jacob glanced backwards and forwards across the heads in front of him, assessing the reactions of the more experienced crews. He tried to dredge from his memory some notion of what it meant to go to Cologne, the level of defences they could expect, what it was the madmen instructors at the OTU and HCU had told him, but he could recall none of it now, his mind had gone blank when he needed it most, and the tired foxhound eyes of the experienced men gave nothing away.

‘Close the blinds, will you?’ clipped the intelligence officer.

The blinds clattered across the blue summer sky and the room went black but for seams of light around the edges of the windows. Someone must have cracked a joke at the back because several men laughed briefly and then stopped. The projector started up its humming and a hundred pairs of eyes followed its searchlight glare onto the screen.

‘This is your target,’ said the intelligence officer. ‘And this is your aiming point …’

He tapped the centre of the photographic image with his cane.

‘Cologne Cathedral. Zero hour is 22.30. The marker flares will be green dripping red. We will confirm the enemy colours of the day
before you depart. We have good information regarding the nature of the defences from previous raids. The searchlight belts extend from …’

Jacob found himself listening intently to the details of the briefing, at the same time asking himself questions that so many new crews across the country would be asking themselves now. What on earth am I doing here? Can this be real? And will I survive? Next to Jacob sat George, remembering the bombs over London in 1940 and his granny aflame on the couch and the glimpse he had caught of her little body as they pushed her like a dead dog into a bag and took her away. Next to George, Charlie was fretting over the navigation routes and further along the line Ralph ran a mental list of the pre-flight checks. Jacob thought of home and wondered what it was that had persuaded him to volunteer for aircrew duties, and then he reminded himself it was for them at home that he had made the decision, to do his bit to end the war, to crush the enemy in such a way that they would never be a threat again, in the way that one crushes a wasp beneath the sole of a boot until its venom runs out, but in the next thought he cursed himself again and noticed that he was gritting his teeth. The briefing ended and someone on the far side of the room said ‘Let’s go kill the bloody Hun,’ and someone laughed at the broken voice and the blinds went up and the sunlight streamed in and the men went off for their pre-flight meal.

They gathered later in the crew room and a WAAF helped Jacob into his gear, and he collected his parachute and his operational rations, the flask of coffee and the juice and sandwiches and chocolate that some wolfed down early because of nerves and others for the same reason could not bring themselves to touch until they were home again in the early hours. A truck took them away to the plane and as he waited for the off Jacob watched the world outside from behind his Perspex dome, the Perspex specked with the remains of insects that the Dog had smashed on previous trips, a world in which a summer evening buzzed with life, alive with wasps full of venom and men and women going about their peaceful errands, and Jacob noticed a boy on the other side of the wire returning with his rods and his nets from a day spent fishing as he used to do, and a man riding his bicycle up the lane, then a young couple walking arm in arm on the way to the pub before a night spent making love with the windows open and a veil of warm air streaming in and her hair thrown back upon the pillow, but the woman’s hair was blowing about now in the backdraught from the
airscrews as wasps hurtled past her in the gale, her world separated from the world of Jacob and his crew – seven helpless wasps in the gale that war had brought on – separated from their world by the wall of noise of four Merlin engines and the grubby claustrophobia of the fuselage and their wasp-specked venom-flecked Perspex prison walls and the prospect of five hours’ flight to and from Germany and the impenetrable fiery veil that would shroud the target, and the filthy task that awaited them, and the unknowable nature of whatever it was that must claim them now.

And then Ralph got his green, he opened the throttles, and Jacob watched the tarmac speeding by, a rushing black river beneath his Perspex bomber’s dome, and then the tarmac fell away and he was airborne, into battle with his crew, men he barely knew, men of air on their way to bomb a city to destruction and themselves one step closer to the end of their tour or the end of their tether. They joined the rest of the bomber stream nosing across the North Sea towards the Dutch coast as night fell upon them and Jacob lay on his belly in the nose and watched clouds drift across the sky like icebergs across a frozen sea, the sun setting small and distant at his back, starbursts of flak suddenly lighting up the sky, creeping nearer as the ack-ack gunners along the coast found their range, shell fragments pocking the underside of the wings and cordite introducing itself to the infant crew for the first time, and then the flak slowly receded as the bomber flew out of range, but Jacob knew the night-fighters would be taking off now from Heligoland, searching their allocated boxes of sky, guided towards the bombers by the radar operators on the ground and looking for the pale blush of a Lancaster’s hot exhausts or the glint of moon on wing, or climbing above the bombers to where the moon pinned their silhouettes against the cloud-base and then down would come the fighters, amok among the flock of lumbering giants. The taste of vomit burnt Jacob’s throat from when he had thrown up on the grass before climbing aboard, and the thought of the fighters brought another gurgle back up into his throat and he forced it back down. He strained his eyes at the night and sensed rather than saw the other bombers beside him in the dark, then bright red tracer skating left to right two hundred yards away and a little plume of light far off in the night that quickly stretched itself along the fuselage of a bomber that had been hit, the plane flying on as more tracer angled into it and the fire became a brighter orange glow, then pink and white as the metal alloy combusted and a blinding white
flash and the Lancaster was gone, and away on the other side another bomber was in flames as it spiralled down through thin cirrus cloud, then another explosion far below and more tracer exchanges high above. The searchlight belts were set in layers and D-Dog passed through the wands of light and a plane was picked up by a blue-tinged master beam and then coned by a dozen others and it was knocked out of the sky by the flak that poured up through the beams and then night-fighters dropped bright white magnesium flares that turned night into day and Jacob threw up into his oxygen mask.

The knocked-back voices of the crew ghosted back and forth across the suffocation of the intercom.

‘Five minutes to target, skipper,’ said Charlie.

‘Righto, navigator. Bomb-aimer, do you have sight of the target?’

‘Straight ahead. Where are the pathfinders? The markers should be going down by now.’

‘There they go,’ said Ralph. ‘Bang on time.’

The flares, green dripping red, fell towards the aiming point in the centre of Cologne.

‘Jesus Christ, look at those searchlights,’ said Ralph. ‘Navigator, come up here and take a look at this.’

‘No thanks, skipper, I’m happy here behind my curtain.’

As the flak burst around them, the searchlights sent up a forest of blinding beams, reaching miles into the sky for as far as the eye could see, and more red and green marker flares went down.

‘Three minutes to target, skipper,’ said Charlie.

‘Roger, navigator, I can see it clear as day. OK, boys, here we go, steady now for the bombing run.’

Jacob lay on his belly in the nose of the bomber and his breath came in long rasping draws as he watched the target swallow up the night with its ferocity, the city already burning and the sky aflame with anti-aircraft shells, burning planes, sudden vast explosions, and the cold unforgiving searchlight stare. The Dog rocked as a shell burst beside her, the sound of boulders tumbling alongside, then a sharper crack and the hard rattle of shell fragments against the fuselage. A searchlight swung across Jacob’s vision and lit up the dome, blinding him momentarily, but the Dog brushed past the beam and then another plane was lurching this way and that, trying to release itself from the grip of the lights, and it veered off into the path of another bomber and they blew up together and drifted away, a million dying embers, and
another was going down now in a precipitous dive into the centre of the burning city.

Jacob was tracking the target indicators towards the bomb-sight and a flak shell burst alongside and the plane jumped and settled. Then it leapt high and dropped and veered off course and there was a great shuddering judder and then Roland’s voice indistinct down the intercom, something about an engine on fire.

‘Repeat that, please, flight engineer,’ said Ralph.

‘I said starboard outer alight, skipper.’

‘How bad?’

‘Gone bloody u/s, I reckon.’

‘Damn it. OK, feathering now. Operate extinguisher.’

‘OK, done. I think it’s out.’

‘Bomb-aimer, are we still on course?’

Jacob was choking something back down his throat again.

‘I said bomb-aimer, are we still on course?’

‘Sorry, skip. Starboard a touch. Starboard again. OK, OK, dead ahead.’

Jacob tracked the aiming point towards the centre of the bombsight, flaming streets drifting past thousands of feet below.

‘Bomb doors open?’

‘Doors open. Left a touch, skipper. Left, left. Steady. Left, left a bit. OK, steady there.’

Jacob’s thumb wavered for a moment upon the tit, the paused hand of death, and this moment of reflection almost stopped him from doing the thing he had to do, had to do to himself and the people beneath the bombs, but then his training kicked in and it booted his humanity aside, and he pressed the tit as hard as he could and the plane lifted up as the departing weight of the bombs let it go and a weight lifted from Jacob’s shoulders, the weight of uncertainty over whether he could do the job, whether he could hold his nerve and do what was expected of him.

‘Bombs gone,’ he said as the lumps fell away and another one formed in his throat. ‘Hold her steady, skip, photoflash coming. OK, we’ve got our photo. Bomb doors closed.’

And he breathed out hard and felt something damp upon his cheeks and the salt edged around the sides of his oxygen mask and lifted red lines upon his face and he knew he was one of the clowns
now, dipped in sadness, drowning in an endless ocean of war that had filled up the space where his future had been.

‘Well done, bomb-aimer,’ said Ralph. ‘Top job. Now let’s go home. Navigator, get me a course.’

Ralph took the plane into a shallow dive, out and away from the sea of flame below, the burning grid of streets with their roofless houses, empty boxes in which people had previously kept their lives. Then Jacob saw a black shape flashing past below, turning up in a hurtling arc.

‘Fighter, skip! Four o’clock.’

‘Gunners, can you see him?’ shouted Ralph.

‘Coming in now!’ yelled a voice.

Then a smacking sound down the intercom, high-explosive shells ripping holes somewhere back along the fuselage, and a smell of smoke that smothered up the vomit.

Then Ralph down the intercom, ‘Where’s that bloody fighter gone?’ and heavy breathing as someone flicked on their intercom switch, and then Don’s voice, ‘He’s gone down beneath us. We’ve got a fire back here, by the way.’

‘Do a banking search, skipper,’ said Jim. ‘We’ll take a look underneath.’

Ralph rocked the plane to one side, then the other, then back again.

‘He’s below us. Corkscrew starboard, go!’ yelled Don, and cannon shells burst in again and something else began to burn and Jacob felt the world fall away as Ralph rammed the Dog into a steepling dive, Jacob pinned to the roof of his dome by the speed of the descent, then a sickening lurch as Ralph and Roland were hauling them level and seven pairs of eyes stared out on stalks in search of the fighter.