Spectral Shadows - Robert Westall Page 0,1

sounds great, like something out of the Boy’s Own Paper, but actually it’s not ’cause all over Europe there are little Jerry night-­fighters sitting on their little nests of radar, just waiting for you to fly over slow as the morning milk cart. That’s why we have these thousand-bomber raids: so Jerry’ll have so many to think about, he’ll run around in circles like a kid with presents on Christmas morning. Safety in numbers: if they’re chopping some other poor sod, they’re not chopping you. So I listen carefully for that little WT signal, which is not easy when the skipper’s taking evasive action and the engines are doing their best to take thirty-­six hours leave of absence from the wings, and our guns are going full blast and everyone’s talking on the intercom at once. They’re not supposed to, but try and stop them when the balloon’s going up.

That’s all about the WT, except you never use it. Jerry would get a fix on you in a flash; then you’d have company. Only time you use it is if you ditch in the sea coming home. Then you send out Mayday on five hundred kilocycles and hold the Morse-­key down for thirty seconds to give them a fix on you. Trouble is, everybody’s listening on five hundred kilocycles – air-­sea rescue, German air-­sea rescue, U-­boats . . . take your pick. I’ve heard of lads freezing to death in the sea while two lots of silly buggers were fighting over them.

The RT – intercom in all your war movies – is a worry too. You’ve got to keep the volume just right, see, so no one outside the crate hears a squeak. Turn the knob too far – easy enough done wearing icy gloves – and Himmler can hear you fart. I’m not shooting a line, honest!

So what keeps us going? Actually, we get a lot of laughs. Remember the time you and me were outside Beaky’s study waiting to be caned, and we couldn’t stop laughing? Well, it’s like that all the time, almost. And we’ve got Dadda. Dadda’s a great guy for laughs. Who’s Dadda? the child asks. Dadda’s our skipper – the big boss-­man. Dadda’s like God, only cleverer. Dadda has changed my life, the way God never did. I remember the first time we saw him.

We arrived at Lower Oadby one January dusk in ’43. Flying Wimpey IIIs. Just the five of us, no Dadda then. The adjutant hadn’t time to bother with us; there was an op on that night, so he just shoved us into a barrack-­room with the crew of L-Love. L-­Love were a bloody good crew – done twenty-­two ops, but they weren’t big-­headed about it. They taught us a lot while they were getting kitted up. Things like always flying dead in the middle of the bomber stream because the Jerry fighters always nibbled at the edges. They weren’t much older than us and made us laugh a lot, though we did wonder a bit why they looked so pale and sweaty; the barrack wasn’t all that warm. And their rear-­gunner was chewing gum so hard, his muscles kept standing out in knots all along his jaw. Anyway, they barged out saying don’t do anything in Lower Oadby they wouldn’t do. If you’ve seen Lower Oadby that’s a big joke.

‘They’re OK,’ said Matt, our only pilot, and we drifted across into their half of the barrack-­room, inspecting their pin-­ups and the photos of their girlfriends stuck on their lockers and touching their spare lucky silk stockings and rabbits’ feet. Not being nosy; just looking and touching so that a bit of their luck would rub off on us. They’d shot down an Me 110, a twittish night-­fighter that had flown slowly past them in the dark without even noticing they were there. Apparently it had blown up like the Fourth of July, and one of its prop-­blades had lodged in L-­Love’s main spar without hurting anybody. Battered and rusting, it now hung over their skipper’s bunk.

The hut was quiet and peaceful. We stoked up the stove till its stovepipe glowed cherry-­red halfway to the ceiling, and we all snored off like babes.

The barrack-­room door banged open with a gust of snow at four in the morning. Somebody shoved on all the lights.

‘Good shopping trip?’ shouted Billy the Kid, our rear-gunner, always first with a wisecrack. We all sat up.

It wasn’t them. It was three stupid-­looking RAF police with snow on