Moral Fibre

She was still at the school on Wednesday evening when one of the boys burst in on her half-covered in mud.

“The gunners are back!” He shouted breathlessly. “The gunners are back!”

Georgina did not immediately grasp what he meant, and started to ask, “What —”

“Sergeants Roper and Osgood!” The boy interrupted her. “They’re back.”

Georgina jumped to her feet and followed the messenger in a state of excited confusion. If they were back and Kit wasn’t, did that mean he was dead? No, she told herself, if they were back, then the chances of Kit’s survival were greater.

All the boys who had been down at the playing fields crowded around the RAF sergeants and the commotion drew other pupils like a magnet. Frank already had his arm around his girl. Nigel caught sight of Georgina first and broke away from the throng to come towards her. He offered his hand, but she embraced him instead, putting her cheek to his. “I’m so glad to see you, Nigel.” Frank joined them, and Georgina repeated the gesture, saying “I’m glad you made it, too, Frank. Is your wound all right?”

Frank grinned and put his hand to his ear and neck, both of which were still swollen and covered with a scab but no longer bandaged. “No worries, Miss!” he assured her

“We don’t know what happened to the skipper,” Nigel answered her unspoken question. “He ordered us to bail out and we went out the door in the tail of the fuselage, but the rest of the crew was still forward. Still, we thought you’d want us to tell you as much as we know.”

“Of course!” Georgina looked around at the horde of children and realised that Nora had followed her out. Pulling Nora into the circle of her arm, she insisted, “But first, what about Terry? Do you know what happened to him?”

The two gunners shook their heads. “As I said, Mess, we got out from the tail, but there’s an escape hatch on the floor of the bomb-aimer’s compartment that the bomb-aimer, pilot and flight engineer use to bail out. The navigator and wireless op can use either exit, but Terry went forward.” Nigel explained.

Mr Willoughby and Mr Baines, the sports instructor, at last caught up with the gaggle of excited boys. With a nod to the RAF, they shooed their charges back towards the sports field so that Georgina could talk to the gunners without spectators. Georgina, with Nora still enclosed in her arm, led the gunners towards the unused tennis courts. Here she stopped and faced Frank and Nigel. “Now. Please. Tell us everything you know.”

“Well, trouble started when the oxygen on Z-Zebra wouldn’t work properly during the test flight. Bishop thought he might have it repaired in time for the sortie, but the skipper didn’t want to take any chances, so Fauquier assigned us to M-Mickey Mouse, instead.” Nigel explained.

Frank jumped in, “Everyone knew Mickey Mouse was jinxed. It always had problems. But, just our luck, nothing went wrong with it on the outward leg, so we had no excuse to turn back. Instead, we reached Hamburg dead on time. As we started the bomb run, we saw the escorts dogfighting. Someone called over the radio that there were Me262s in the dust up, but, of course, that didn’t bother the skipper. He did the run anyway.”

Nigel continued, “We’d turned back for England, when one of the bastards fell on us out of the sky.”

“We returned fire with everything we had, Miss Reddings, but just like last time,” Frank unconsciously fingered his ear and neck scar, “it just flashed past us.”

“There wasn’t even time to corkscrew,” Nigel emphasised. “I think I shouted at the skipper to corkscrew port, but it was too late.”

Frank took over the narrative again. “The Lanc bucked and shuddered violently, so we knew we’d been hit. A moment later I noticed fire almost immediately below me. I dropped down and started fighting it with the blankets from the rest bed — which didn’t do a lot of good. Luckily, Daddy and Terry arrived with two fire extinguishers, and somehow the three of us managed to put the fire out. It was quite frightening, but at least Jerry hadn’t hit the engines or the fuel tanks. If he’d done that, it would have been curtains. As it was, despite the damage, we thought we could still get home.”

“Only we were leaking hydraulic fuel,” Nigel explained, “and the oxygen feed to my turret was broken. I managed to gasp out that I couldn’t breathe just before I blacked out.”

“The skipper dived to below ten thousand feet as fast as he could,” Frank assured an alarmed Georgina, “while Daddy and I went back to try to drag Nigel out of his turret. Together we pulled him inside and hooked him up to oxygen in Terry’s workstation, but then the starboard inner sputtered and went dead. The skipper called for Daddy to come forward to help him restart it, and a few minutes later he asked Adrian for the shortest course to take us over Allied lines.”

“That was when we realized that he didn’t think we could get home,” Nigel put in.

Frank nodded. “I think we lost a second engine. We couldn’t see from where we were, and things started happening rather fast after that. At least it seemed like it. Adrian gave the skipper a course, but then he changed it, I think.”

Nigel’s face was taut with remembered tension now. “The skipper told us to prepare to bail out, so we clipped on our parachutes, and Frank and I went back to the tail. We waited for what seemed like a long time, but we thought it was just to be sure we bailed out over Allied-controlled territory.”

“We didn’t want to fall into German hands because they’ve been shooting Allied airmen lately,” Frank explained. “Finally, the order came to ‘abandon ship’. We might have been losing altitude, but the skipper was still flying smooth as silk — except for some intermittent vibrations. We had little difficulty jettisoning the door or getting out. Nigel went out first. I followed and kept my eye on him as I went down. As soon as I landed, I buried my ‘chute and started in the direction I’d last seen him.”

Nigel flashed a quick grin at his crewmate, “I’d watched Frank come down and started walking in his direction, so within an hour we found one another. We’d already cut off the tops of our flying boots and we had our silk maps. The problem was we didn’t know which way we’d been flying when we’d jumped, so we didn’t have a clue which way to walk.”

“But what about the aircraft?” Georgina interrupted. “Did you see the others jump? Or did Kit try to crash land?”

The two gunners looked at one another and shook their heads. Nigel, looking a little shamefaced, admitted, “We didn’t see or hear the aircraft go in, Miss.”

“Or see any other parachutes either,” Frank added. “There was a forest very nearby that blocked our view.”

“And I suppose we were a bit over-excited and confused by then. We just started walking until we came to a road and turned onto it.”