‘You might as well,’ Nash said. ‘There’s eff-all in Blighty, these days.’
9
Nash was a large man with dark hair swept back, thick lips and quick brown eyes. We smoked and talked in one of our narrow rooms after roaming the town at night for a place to eat. His father had been a market gardener in richest Lincolnshire, but Nash left school at fourteen and took any job he could find till volunteering for aircrew in 1940. ‘I wanted to get above it all!’ he said. ‘My feet had been too long on the ground, and I fancied a bit of flying, but I was sent to a station in Scotland to work in the stores. I lacked little, and thought I had a cushy billet for the duration, but two years later I was called to an aircrew selection board. There were so many changes of station to Birmingham I almost lost myself. Then I was sent to St John’s Wood for physical tests. I got through those and went to ITW, a conveyor belt for training aircrew, and I was happy to be on it. We marched at 120 paces to the minute to get speed of reaction, and the infantry weren’t fitter. There was classroom work on meteorology, navigation, engines – you name it, they taught it. I’d never worked so hard, going from one classroom to another, and then to do drill and PT in the hangar. Rain or shine, we never stopped.
‘I went on a twenty-four-week air gunner’s course, training on Bothas, Wimpies and Lancasters. I started ops in ’43 as a rear gunner. I got the last of the central heating, and often froze so much I couldn’t move anything but fingers and eyes. Which was all that was needed. I suppose I pissed up more Lanes than any other bod in the service. Apart from anything else I was physically too big for the job. I’m sure they picked big blokes on purpose to stick in those small turrets sometimes for eight hours at a stretch. I got a JU88 above Frankfurt, and damaged another over Holland – shoot first and die later, if you have to. Our luck was ladled out by the Big Dipper. We came home on a QDM from the wireless operator who had a piece of shrapnel in his eye. That was the trip we got the gongs for.
‘Me and Bennett had done so many ops we could choose our time for a night off, and on one pass to London the rest of the crew went bang over Cologne, including the CO who’d given us the pass, because that night he was captain. We’d done our turn. Let somebody else sit on the flying bomb racks and flog Sodom and Gomorrah night after night just to get back home and have a fried egg for breakfast. Bennett wangled a conversion course to flying boats and took me as his tail gunner. I was game for a change. Over the Atlantic the stars were where they should be (when they were) and not burning to death on the ground.
‘The Sunderlands carried a galley and a steward so that sausages as well as fried eggs could be had en route. A couple of JU88s once nosed too close, but after our gunners played the Browning version the skipper lost them in a cloud.’
Nash told the story of his life more than once, but I had the feeling that when the rest of our crew got here he would talk less. There seemed to be a gap in his story when he came to his time with Coastal Command. They ‘killed’ one U-boat, oil and dirty water telling of its demise. I knew from his wavering eyes, and disparagement about the mouth, that there was something of this incident that he wanted to tell but couldn’t. I was fitted for the job of listening, and never poked my nose where it wasn’t wanted. The trade selection tests hadn’t been far out in deciding that Bennett be a pilot, Nash a gunner, and me a wireless operator.
‘Though the Lord was a man of war, I was man enough to like peace when it came.’ He poured out more of that vile and sickly Van der Hum wine. ‘The first summer after demob was real life at last. A group of us would hire a boat in Boston and go out on the Wash trawling shrimps. We’d cook and eat them, and brew tea on a primus, and spend all day on the water, and come back with mussels by the pound, and I’d tip my share in the bath and throw them a handful of breadcrumbs. The good old days were here again, when you could expect to be alive a week, a month, even a year ahead.’
He couldn’t sit more than half an hour without needing to piss. His restless eyes settled into a stare, and he stood up with an apology he never made until this malady struck. He had taken pills, powders and potions, but nothing stopped this clockwork aggravation of the bladder: ‘A disease that no quack can cure, and which doesn’t kill, is no disease at all. You’ve got no business having it. The symptoms may be imaginary, but the effect is uncomfortable. If you suffer, it’s your own fault, so it’s no use blaming the doctors, or getting God on the blower, like Job.’
By the samphire borders of the Wash, he stood on the edge of the boat and sent streams of amber piss into the water while his mates’ backs were turned. A god to Nash would have been one who concocted a pill which allowed him a full night without getting up.
He would put money made out of the present trip into resurrecting the building firm he had run with his brother. From jobbing work they had, despite chronic shortages (since everything went for council houses and repairing bomb damage), increased their range to bungalows, finding a way through labyrinthine red tape to obtain materials and acquire sites. Difficulties overcome not only brought higher profits, but laid down procedures along which one could afterwards run with the ease of a trolley on rails. A nod, a wink, a gift, a fiver (or more) at a tricky obstacle cleared the hairpin bends like magic.
For what the judge called ‘a scandalous case of bribery and corruption’ he was sent to jail for eighteen months. Given time to brood, he saw no sense in being penalized merely for using his enterprise in days of such gratuitously imposed austerity. He found ways around the rules. Show intelligence, and you get kicked in the guts. ‘If it hadn’t been for this flying boat job, I’d have gone down and never come up again. The skipper doesn’t mind that I’ve been in prison. He stands by his old crew. And most of ’em do, which is something to be said for a doomed generation.’
This remark was the closest he got to self-pity, and I wheeled him out of it by saying I had never believed in such talk. ‘Ours was doomed, though,’ he said. ‘You missed it by a couple of years. Only ten per cent survived a tour of ops. Hundreds of bods fell out of the sky every night.’
I had often regretted not having been born earlier. When someone told me that a funny bomb had ended the war I called him a bloody liar. Adolescence was War, and suddenly both war and youth ended. Nash had come out with honour but an incontinent bladder.
He wiped tears from his left eye. ‘Germany’s pin-up boy sealed our doom. They killed whole fucking generations!’
‘Each generation is made up of any number of individuals,’ I said, ‘and as one of them I didn’t have, don’t have and never shall have any intention of dooming myself.’
Then he said, and I was too drunk to ask why: ‘When this flying boat takes off, you’ll come as close to being doomed as you’ll ever want to be. If you team up with Bennett, you ask for all you get.’
I was always conscious, even at my most obtuse, of being wholesomely attached to life. At the same time I thought that the possibility of being doomed was not something over which I had any control. But we had talked so long that I had to give in and say I was ready for the straw.
‘Sleep’ll be the death of you,’ he scoffed. ‘Be the death of me, as well. Trouble with sleep is you might not wake up. Maybe that’s why I get out of bed to piss six times a night. Shit-scared of going so far under I’ll never get back. People spend a third of their lives asleep. Twenty odd years off three-score-and-ten. It’s daylight robbery! You’ll get all the sleep you like when you’re dead, so why rush? If we could go through life without bed we’d live longer, and enjoy the final sleep better when it came. We’d kip so long there’d be no Heaven or Hell, or we’d be too tired to notice it. You only think such places exist if you have too much sleep when you’re alive.’