LITMIR.BIZ

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enough money to keep himself, his young wife and two kids in a small cottage with a view of the sea while he laboured on a book. It was a murder mystery, set in a Cornish tin mine, and although he modestly referred to it as a whodunit he had inserted the description ‘a psychological study in depth of the mind of the criminally insane’ into the publisher’s blurb. The Scotsman found it promising, The Observer thought it had grip, but a left-wing weekly said that ‘hand-made, and thus readily identified, cigarette ends have become a careless vice among the sort of villains who people this year’s mediocre detective fiction’. He was stuck halfway through a sequel about a carefully organized bank robbery when the war began. Longfellow volunteered.

      An Intelligence Officer’s special responsibility was the Briefing Room. At Warley Fen it was a large wooden hut that could seat one hundred and fifty aircrew on benches. There was a stage at one end and behind it a map of Europe that stretched the width of the hut. Covering the map there was a red curtain that swept aside at the pull of a string. It had become usual for the Station commander to pull the string.

      Along each side of the hut there were windows. They should have been shuttered at briefing time but lately the weather had been so fine and warm that they’d been left open. There were the usual ‘Careless talk costs lives’ posters and a notice board with Intelligence memos fastened to it with bright red pins. Specially arranged by Flying Officer Longfellow were the ‘This is your enemy’ displays: photos and three-view drawings of Bf110 and Junkers 88 night fighters as well as some speculative Air Ministry diagrams of what the newer German fighter planes might look like.

      From the ceiling hung models of both enemy and Allied aircraft, each one clearly marked with its designation and wing span. Then there was the Accident Board with photos of aeroplanes drunkenly askew after sliding off the runway or with a prop blade eating up a tailplane after a taxiing collision. At one side of the stage there was the easel standing ready for the Met Department’s Cloud Board (icing cloud in red, non-icing cloud in blue, all stacked to show altitudes). On the other side of the stage, reaching to the ceiling, there was the Photo Ladder. This didn’t denote a proficiency in photography but showed the accuracy of the bombing, bomb explosions being plotted from the flashlight photo that each bomber took as its bomb-load landed. Lambert’s crew were in the top quarter of the ladder but Flight Lieutenant Sweet’s crew were well down.

      Longfellow was proud of this Briefing Room upon which he and his clerks had spent so much time and energy. It embodied all the freshness and appeal of a commercial display or a newspaper layout. It was kept up to date every day and on the notice board there were a world map and a bulletin with a first-class summary of the war on all fronts, as well as a note on yellow paper in which Longfellow attempted to predict the strategic aspirations of the fighting powers. This supposition was clearly headed ‘Intelligence Guesswork’. Often during the day aircrew would wander into the Briefing Room, looking at the new displays or leafing through newspapers or copies of Flight, Aeroplane Spotter, Tee Em or one of the other technical magazines. Longfellow often claimed, ‘There’s not another Briefing Room in the whole of Bomber Command where the crews pop in and look round when there’s no briefing. Even if most of them only want to see Jane in the Daily Mirror, doze for half an hour and scrounge a coffee, by the time they wander out again they could have seen something that will save their lives.’

      Cosily full of bacon, beans and fried eggs – a rare luxury – none of them now dozed. The room was full with the crews of all sixteen bombers. The men, sitting stiffly upright and white-faced with tension, were waiting for permission to smoke. As the time of danger approached men grew lonely and the flyers were dividing into their assigned crews. They exchanged comments and smiles with men they didn’t like and had only briefly seen since the previous operational flight four days earlier. For now men were drawing close, not to their friends but to six men who for the next few hours would share their good or fatal fortune.

      Lambert’s two gunners for instance, Binty Jones and Flash Gordon, had a deadly feud dating from over two months before, but now they were exchanging jokes just as they’d done in the old days. They had met at the gunnery school and promised each other that they would insist on being in the same crew. They were thickset young men chosen, like most air gunners, for the short stature that enabled them to fit into the power-operated turrets. Flash was a dark-complexioned, gap-toothed Nottingham miner, a real pitman who’d worked at the coalface on the trickiest seam. His hair was very long and with the aid of generous amounts of hair cream he arranged it in long shiny arabesques. For fear of disturbing its patterns he would avoid wearing a uniform cap. His liking for gold-plated identity chains, skull-and-crossbone rings and white silk scarves and his unmilitary bearing had given him his nickname. He shared it with a strip-cartoon hero of the same patronymic. His wide mouth smiled easily. Digby had said, ‘He hasn’t got a mouth but a small hinge on the back of his neck.’ He was, in fact, proud of his white teeth. In spite of being exempt from military service he’d volunteered on his twenty-first birthday. He hated the pit; his only ambition was to survive the war and get an office job with a local tobacco factory. He was a cheerful boy with lots of energy and endless questions. He always wanted to know what his fellow airmen did in civvy street and he was not too shy to ask how much they earned doing it. Flash Gordon manned the rear gun turret.

      Binty, a Welsh milkman – Jones the Milk – was also twenty-one. He usually manned the mid-upper turret, although a few times when Flash had a head-cold they swapped. Flash often got head-colds because, he said, the rear turret heater didn’t work properly.

      Binty had joined the RAF when he was seventeen, which made him a peacetime airman by a few weeks. He believed that the superiority of the peacetime recruit was manifested by his very short hair, shiny boots and buttons, and razor pleats that he made by treating the inside of each crease with a layer of soap. His smartness was thus virtually unique among the aircrew NCOs. He was not beyond reprimanding airmen and even corporals for minor faults like having a pocket unbuttoned. This made him very unpopular.

      He affected the old soldier’s vocabulary, sprinkled with mispronounced Arabic and adapted Hindi. Bint was his word for young girl and he used it frequently, for in spite of an unappealing face he was a womanizer of renown. He had quick eyes and a brain which he described as shrewd but which the rest of his crew knew was cunning. However, none of them would allow an outsider to describe Binty Jones as cunning and they all appreciated that his cleanliness and efficiency extended not only to his sex-life and motorbike but also to his Browning machine guns. Artfully he had laid a claim to the upper turret for which there were only two guns.

      Binty and Flash had flown fifteen operations, all with Lambert. They had been close pals for nearly a year; drinking, whoring, fighting, and sharing girlfriends, gunnery exam answers, cigarettes and a 350-cc BSA motorcyle, until they had met a woman named Rose in a pub in Peterborough. Her husband was a corporal in the Eighth Army fighting in the desert. Flash Gordon said they shouldn’t see her any more but Binty said she was a sure thing and now spent more nights at her apartment than he did on the base. ‘No one can have their wives within forty miles of their base,’ said Binty, ‘but Station Standing Orders don’t say you can’t have someone else’s wife.’ The two gunners hated each other but now you would never have guessed it. Binty sat reading a tightly wadded Beano comic and nodding while Flash told him about a motorcycle that an electrician on A Flight wanted to sell for fifteen pounds. Flash admired Binty’s knowledge of motorcycles.

      A fat fly buzzed and settled on Digby’s hand. Even a finger prodded at it failed to move it. ‘Lazy old bugger,’ said Digby.

      ‘Put him out the window,’ said Lambert. ‘He’s probably just finishing his second tour.’ But Digby tipped it on to the floor and Jimmy Grimm put his boot on it.

      The briefing was running late. It was already 17.05 hours by the big clock but half of the chairs on the platform were still empty. The Assistant Adjutant, Jammy Giles, was there, of course, tipping back in his chair until it nearly fell over, laughing noisily and joking with a group of flyers in the front row. The Intelligence Officer, Longfellow, was also there. He always arrived early to be sure that his precious charts and diagrams were set up and to check that the route was correctly taped on the big map and the curtains closed upon it. He stood behind Jammy and steadied the chair each time it

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