The Crew Read Free Page A

get through the training unless you did – but when it had come to the real thing, he kept getting into a complete panic and losing his head; forgetting everything he’d learned.
    The thought of letting the rest of them down – maybe getting them all killed, not just lost on atraining exercise like today – filled him with a sickening horror. To get oneself killed was one thing, to be responsible for six other deaths along with your own, quite another. Of course, it was the same for each of them. Their lives depended on the other chaps doing their jobs properly. They were bound to each other like links in a chain – and a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. He hoped to God that link wasn’t himself.
    In a couple of weeks they’d be posted to an operational station somewhere and doing their first sortie. The first of the thirty. The chances of getting through the tour weren’t terribly good, he knew, but he tried not to think about that either. After all, they could be one of the lucky ones. Survive your first five, he’d heard somebody chant, and double your chances of staying alive.
    He wondered why Van had volunteered to fight in a war that hadn’t been his country’s problem. The skipper never talked about it – hardly talked about himself at all – but he must have joined up long before the Japanese had attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. From the little he knew of America, mostly from films, they seemed to live pretty comfortably over there. Certainly a lot better than wartime England. Plenty of food and everything, and no bombs. Mad to come here.
    â€˜Think anyone’d mind if I played that piano?’ Van said, nodding towards the beer-stained upright in the corner of the Mess.
    â€˜Golly, I shouldn’t think so.’ He watched his skipper make his way across the room, park his beer and cigarette and sit down at the keys. He played a few bars of a song that Piers recognized vaguely butcouldn’t put a title to. After a while he realized that Van was rather good. A lot of the chaps had stopped talking and were listening, and some of them gathered round the piano. Piers drank his sherry and smoked his American cigarette and listened. He felt a lot better now. With any luck they’d be posted somewhere decent – one of the pre-war aerodromes with proper buildings, not tin huts. And before that, there’d be some leave so he could get home for a few days. He was looking forward to that.

Two
    IN THE FADING light, the bombers were emerging from their dispersal pans and lumbering after each other round the perimeter track, like elephants in a circus ring.
    Assistant Section Officer Catherine Herbert stood with the small group of station personnel beside the runway, watching the Lancasters and waiting to wave them off. Whatever the weather, every kite was seen off on every op, and every time she wondered which ones they were waving goodbye to for ever.
    Although it was May, there was a cold wind blowing hard from the Wolds and she had to hang on to her cap. The hedgerows and a huddle of bent trees along the eastern edge of the aerodrome were the only protection on the piece of flat Lincolnshire farm land that had been turned hurriedly into a wartime bomber station. The ancient farm buildings lay at the northern perimeter and a raw group of Nissen huts and wooden shacks had sprung up among the trees to the east. Drab brown and green camouflage, ugly corrugated iron and asbestos, concrete paths linked across oozing mud, gigantic steel hangars, barbed wire, the deafening roar of heavy bombers, a ceaseless wind. That was RAF Beningby.
    She had hated it at first, and then gradually got used to it. There was a war on, after all, which meantgetting used to everything – including men dying.
    The big four-engined bombers had only been with the squadron a few weeks, and they were an impressive sight. And an impressive sound. Mingled