The Separation (9 page)

All he would say about my position was that if I wanted to leave with him I’d be welcome. If not, I’d have to find my own way home with one of the other teams.

Meanwhile, I was becoming as stubborn as him. If the British Olympic Committee wanted us to stay on for the closing ceremony, then we should do that. And then there was the reception at the British Embassy, which we would have to attend in less than an hour.

Finally, we reluctantly settled on the inevitable compromise that satisfied neither of us. Joe agreed to delay his departure until after the embassy reception, which I would go to on my own while he collected our property and loaded the van. We would then leave Berlin together. But if I was late meeting him after the party, or missed him somehow, he would set off without me.

While we had been arguing, Birgit’s violin had fallen silent.

I settled down in an angry mood to pack my belongings. An atmosphere of resentment hovered in the room around both of us. I put on a clean shirt and jacket and the only necktie I had brought with me. I slipped my medal into my pocket.

I wanted to see the Sattmanns before I left, to say goodbye and thanks. I particularly wanted to see Birgit again, one last time. I went from room to room, but the place was empty. It felt too silent, making me wonder how much of our argument had been audible. To leave without giving thanks to these long-term friends of my mother’s was grossly discourteous, it seemed to me. It added to my sense of outrage at Joe, but there was no longer any point in arguing with him. I went down to the dusty street outside, where the air was still stiflingly hot at this hour. I walked to the S-Bahnhof.

12

At the end of June 1941, nearly five years after Joe and I competed in the Olympics, I was recovering in a convalescent hospital in the Vale of Evesham. Gradually my memory was sharpening up. I was confident that this alone meant that I was on the mend, that I could soon return to my squadron. I was at last walking without crutches, although I did need a stick. Every day I took a turn about the gardens and every day I was able to walk a little further. The solitude gave me the chance to think, to remember what my life had been before the crash. The mental exercise began as a desperate quest to find myself there in the past, but as the days slipped by I took a real interest in discovering what had happened to me. I remembered, for instance, that on the morning before that last raid I had woken up early. The squadron had not been on ops the night before, having been stood down in mid-afternoon. In the indescribably heady mood of release that followed a stand-down I drove into Lincoln with Lofty Skinner and Sam Levy to see the early-evening showing of
Santa Fe Trail,
starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Afterwards we went to a fish and chip shop for our dinner, walked around the quiet evening streets of Lincoln for a while, then decided to return to the airfield in time to watch the Whitleys of 166 Squadron - with whom we shared the airfield at Tealby Moor - taking off for their own raid. By ten-thirty the airfield was quiet again and I went to my hut to sleep. I slept so deeply that not even the sound of the Whitleys returning in the early hours woke me.

After breakfast the next morning, May 10, I carried out an air-test on A-Able, flew three low circuits of the airfield, then before lunch Kris Galasckja told me he needed to calibrate his guns in the rear turret, so I flew him in the Wellington across to the gunnery-range at RAF Wickenby. We had lunch at Wickenby and were back at Tealby Moor before two in the afternoon.

Then the growing, inexorable pre-raid tension could not be ignored any longer. Everyone was watching for the familiar first signs of raid preparations: staff cars coming and going, trolleys of high-explosive bombs being trundled in from the distant dump, the engineers running up the engines and so on. We saw the various section chiefs heading for a meeting with the station commander: bombing and navigation leaders, met. officers, comms chiefs and so on. By two-thirty we were certain we would be flying that night. For us, though, there was nothing to do until the briefings began in the early evening. Restlessness coursed through me. In the prewar years I would have gone for a run or taken a boat out on the river to work off any unwanted nervous energy, but in wartime conditions on a RAF station there were few such outlets. The rest of my crew were lounging about in the mess, playing cards or writing letters, showing their state of tension in different ways from mine, but I knew what they were going through. I left them to it and walked around the aircraft dispersals for a while, killing time. At last it was time for the pre-raid briefing and I went across to the station hall, almost eager to begin. Once all the crews were settled in place, though, I found it hard to concentrate on what was being said. The target for the night was Hamburg: the station commander displayed the necessary maps of the general area and the city centre. We would be attacking the commercial area and the docks, making an early diversion to Lüneburg in the south to try to put the Hamburg flak batteries off their guard. I forced myself to concentrate: the lives of everyone in the plane could depend on this briefing. Afterwards, the same sense of quiet agitation continued through the hasty pre-raid meal, through the technical tests and checks on engines, flying controls, guns, bomb-release mechanism, tyres and so on. I was under no illusions about what was causing the nervousness. By this time, what we all wanted to do was climb into the plane, take off for the raid and get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. At just before eight o’clock a WAAF corporal drove us out to the aircraft in the crew bus. It was a warm evening and we were sweating and feeling overdressed in our fur-lined leather flying jackets, heavy boots, padded trousers. The gunners wore more clothes than the rest of us: their turrets were draughty and unheated, so they wrapped themselves up in additional layers beneath their electrically warmed flying suits (which warmed nothing): they wore extra underclothes, pullovers, two or three pairs of gloves and socks.

I hauled myself up through the hatch in the floor of the fuselage and went straight to the cockpit. I squeezed into the seat. Everything was in good working order, the LAC told me informally as I scribbled my name on the sheet of paper on the clipboard to sign off the plane for the ground crew. No problems, nothing to worry about. Take her out and bring her home. Our last raid had been six nights earlier, on the dockyards in Brest, where we had been trying to hit the German warships
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau,
so I felt a little out of practice as we went through the rote of pre-flight technical and arming checks. Both engines started at the first attempt. A good sign.

As we were taxiing down from dispersal to the take-off point it seemed to me that the plane felt heavier than usual, but I knew we were carrying a full load of fuel and bombs. I ran the engines up and down, clearing their throats, kicked the rudder left and right, feeling the aircraft responding sluggishly. Tonight was what Bomber Command called a maximum effort. A runway marshal gave me the thumbs-up as we lumbered past him, then turned away with his head bent over and his hand clamped down on his cap. The slipstream from our props bashed against him. Ahead of us was M-Mother with Derek Hanton at the controls - I’d known Derek since the days of the University Air Squadron. Behind us and to the side other Wellingtons were rolling forward from their dispersal positions, turning laboriously on to the side runway, taxiing down, ready to take off. On the other side of the main runway I could see a similar procession of slow-moving aircraft, a gathering of might, ready to go. We passed the caravan where the airfield controller had his station. No lights showed.

As usual, a little crowd had gathered at the end of the main runway to wave us off: WAAFs, ground crew, station officers, all turned out to watch us leave. Every night there would be someone there, standing against the perimeter fence where a great thicket of trees pressed close to the edge of the airfield. M-Mother rolled forward, turned on to the main runway, propellers blurring, flattening and shaking the grass in the slipstream. Derek accelerated away slowly. Another Wellington from the side runway opposite moved across to take his place. At last our turn came and I pushed the Wellington forward, swung her around to face down the long concrete strip. The airsock was slack. I watched the dim outline of the airfield controller’s caravan: from this position I could see a steady red light, holding me until the airspace was clear. I waited, waited, the engines turning, the plane rattling and shuddering. My hand on the throttles was blurred by the vibration. I tried to stay calm. The light went to green at last. Our watchers at the side waved cheerfully.

I released the brakes, opened the throttles, adjusted the pitch and we began to move down the runway, slowly at first, so slowly, feeling every bump in the hastily laid concrete, the wings rocking, then a gradual increase in speed, the instruments showing we were going faster than it seemed. At flying speed, with the tail already free of the ground, I pulled back on the stick and the Wellington began its long, shallow climb into the evening sky.

As we ascended slowly through the calm air. circling over the familiar fields to gain a little height before setting off across the sea, I looked down at the quiet meadows and untidy rows of trees, their long shadows striking eastwards. I saw the steeples of churches, clusters of village houses, irrationally curving roads, hazy smoke from chimneys. Lincoln cathedral loomed up a fewmiles away to the south-east, the tall spire black against the blue of the evening sky. There were other aircraft in sight: Wellingtons from our own station, below and around us, but also far away, miles off, more tiny black dots lifting away from their own airfields, circling for height around the wide assembly point, seeking the others, aiming to form a broad and self-defensive stream for the long flight across the North Sea. At last the radio signal came from the ground controller, his final clearance to start the raid. We turned one last time to the east, climbing steadily, away from the brilliant setting sun and towards the gathering dusk. The gunners let off a few trial rounds, their tracers glinting sharply down towards the sea. At five thousand feet the interior of the plane started to feel cold -for a few minutes we were actually more comfortable than we had been on the ground, before the sub-zero freeze of high altitude gripped us. At seven thousand feet I ordered the crew to put on their oxygen masks.

The evening was a deception of calm and beauty, with the steadily darkening sky above us, a plateau of grey clouds below us with a few more white cumulus billowing up, lit by the lowering sun. Germany lay ahead. We flew for an hour, slowly gaining height.

Ted Burrage suddenly came on the intercom. He was on the front guns.

‘Enemy aircraft below us, JL! Three o’clock. Approaching fast!’

‘How far below?’

‘A long way.’

‘Can you get a line on them?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Hold your fire for a moment . . . they might not have seen us!’

Then I saw the aircraft myself. They were at least two or three thousand feet beneath us, crossing our track, south to north. All were clearly visible against the grey plain of clouds below, lit by the last glow of evening light. The leading aircraft was twin-engined. It looked to me like a Messerschmitt Me-110, a guess that was almost instantly confirmed by others in the crew as they also spotted it. Behind it were four single-engined fighters, Me-109s, flying much faster, rapidly overhauling it. I could see Ted swinging his turret round in the nose of the Wellington, bringing his guns to bear, but within seconds it was obvious that none of the Luftwaffe planes was interested in us.

The fighters were diving on the Me-110. I saw tracer or cannon fire flickering across the short space between them. They hit the plane on their first run. One of the Me-110’s tanks exploded with a spectacular burst of flame, throwing the aircraft on to its back. Immediately, the Me-109s swung away, turning sharply to each side of the stricken plane. There was a second explosion and this time part of the wing fell away. The plane had lost flying speed and was diving, upside-down, towards the sea. It plummeted into the cloudbase. All I could see of it for another second was an orange diffusion of flame, but then that too disappeared.

The Me-109s continued their sweeping turns, diving down towards the cover of the clouds, heading back to the south, the way they had come. They took no notice of us.

‘Bloody hell! Ted said. Then he said again, ‘Bloody
hell!
’

‘What was all that about?’

For a moment the intercom was full of voices. Sam Levy and Kris Galasckja had not been able to see what was going on. Lofty, Colin and Ted were describing what we’d seen. I was trying to yell at them to stay on watch. When we were over the North Sea we were never far from enemy aircraft. As if to underline the point I saw more German aircraft coming towards us. This time they were travelling east to west and were about a mile away from us on the left.

I shouted to the gunners to be ready. ‘More bandits! About nine o’clock!’

‘Got them, JL!’ Ted shouted. ‘They’re the same ones!’

‘Couldn’t be. The 109s buggered off as soon as they’d hit the 110.’

‘No, I think Ted’s right!’ It was Lofty, who had come into the cockpit beside me, standing up, peering through the canopy over my shoulder.

I took another look. Once again, the aircraft were silhouetted against the grey cloudbase; once again an Me-110 was flying fast and low against the surface of the clouds, with a small section of single-engined fighters behind him, in hot pursuit.

‘What the devil are the Jerries up to?’

‘Don’t fire,’ I ordered the gunners. ‘They’re not interested in us. Don’t change things.’

I saw the 109s turning in for an attack, in two groups of two, one following the other. They peeled off in a sharp turn, flew broadside at the 110, their tracer glittering like jewels, curling around the Me-110. The pilot dived sharply, banked away, reversed the bank, swooped down. The 109s recovered from their attacking pass and swept around for another try. Now the 110 was in a steep dive towards the clouds. Tracer curled towards it.