Meanwhile, I was becoming as stubborn as him. If the British Olympic Committee wanted us to stay on for the closing ceremony, then we should do that. And then there was the reception at the British Embassy, which we would have to attend in less than an hour.
Finally, we reluctantly settled on the inevitable compromise that satisfied neither of us. Joe agreed to delay his departure until after the embassy reception, which I would go to on my own while he collected our property and loaded the van. We would then leave Berlin together. But if I was late meeting him after the party, or missed him somehow, he would set off without me.
While we had been arguing, Birgit’s violin had fallen silent.
I settled down in an angry mood to pack my belongings. An atmosphere of resentment hovered in the room around both of us. I put on a clean shirt and jacket and the only necktie I had brought with me. I slipped my medal into my pocket.
I wanted to see the Sattmanns before I left, to say goodbye and thanks. I particularly wanted to see Birgit again, one last time. I went from room to room, but the place was empty. It felt too silent, making me wonder how much of our argument had been audible. To leave without giving thanks to these long-term friends of my mother’s was grossly discourteous, it seemed to me. It added to my sense of outrage at Joe, but there was no longer any point in arguing with him.
I went down to the dusty street outside, where the air was still stiflingly hot at this hour. I walked to the S-Bahnhof.
12
At the end of June 1941, nearly five years after Joe and I competed in the Olympics, I was recovering in a convalescent hospital in the Vale of Evesham. Gradually my memory was sharpening up. I was confident that this alone meant that I was on the mend, that I could soon return to my squadron. I was at last walking without crutches, although I did need a stick. Every day I took a turn about the gardens and every day I was able to walk a little further. The solitude gave me the chance to think, to remember what my life had been before the crash. The mental exercise began as a desperate quest to find myself there in the past, but as the days slipped by I took a real interest in discovering what had happened to me.
I remembered, for instance, that on the morning before that last raid I had woken up early. The squadron had not been on ops the night before, having been stood down in mid-afternoon.
In the indescribably heady mood of release that followed a stand-down I drove into Lincoln with Lofty Skinner and Sam Levy to see the early-evening showing of Santa Fe Trail, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Afterwards we went to a fish and chip shop for our dinner, walked around the quiet evening streets of Lincoln for a while, then decided to return to the airfield in time to watch the Whitleys of 166 Squadron - with whom we shared the airfield at Tealby Moor - taking off for their own raid. By ten-thirty the airfield was quiet again and I went to my hut to sleep. I slept so deeply that not even the sound of the Whitleys returning in the early hours woke me.
After breakfast the next morning, May 10, I carried out an air-test on A-Able, flew three low circuits of the airfield, then before lunch Kris Galasckja told me he needed to calibrate his guns in the rear turret, so I flew him in the Wellington across to the gunnery- range at RAF Wickenby. We had lunch at Wickenby and were back at Tealby Moor before two in the afternoon.
Then the growing, inexorable pre-raid tension could not be ignored any longer. Everyone was watching for the familiar first signs of raid preparations: staff cars coming and going, trolleys of high-explosive bombs being trundled in from the distant dump, the engineers running up the engines and so on. We saw the various section chiefs heading for a meeting with the station commander: bombing and navigation leaders, met. officers, comms chiefs and so on. By two-thirty we were certain we would be flying that night. For us, though, there was nothing to do until the briefings began in the early evening.
Restlessness coursed through me. In the prewar years I would have gone for a run or taken a boat out on the river to work off any unwanted nervous energy, but in wartime conditions on a RAF station there were few such outlets. The rest of my crew were lounging about in the mess, playing cards or writing letters, showing their state of tension in different ways from mine, but I knew what they were going through. I left them to it and walked around the aircraft dispersals for a while, killing time.
At last it was time for the pre-raid briefing and I went across to the station hall, almost eager to begin. Once all the crews were settled in place, though, I found it hard to concentrate on what was being said. The target for the night was Hamburg: the station commander displayed the necessary maps of the general area and the city centre. We would be attacking the commercial area and the docks, making an early diversion to Lüneburg in the south to try to put the Hamburg flak batteries off their guard. I forced myself to concentrate: the lives of everyone in the plane could depend on this briefing.
Afterwards, the same sense of quiet agitation continued through the hasty pre-raid meal, through the technical tests and checks on engines, flying controls, guns, bomb-release mechanism, tyres and so on. I was under no illusions about what was causing the nervousness. By this time, what we all wanted to do was climb into the plane, take off for the raid and get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.
At just before eight o’clock a WAAF corporal drove us out to the aircraft in the crew bus. It was a warm evening and we were sweating and feeling overdressed in our fur-lined leather flying jackets, heavy boots, padded trousers. The gunners wore more clothes than the rest of us: their turrets were draughty and unheated, so they wrapped themselves up in additional layers beneath their electrically warmed flying suits (which warmed nothing): they wore extra underclothes, pullovers, two or three pairs of gloves and socks.
I hauled myself up through the hatch in the floor of the fuselage and went straight to the cockpit. I squeezed into the seat. Everything was in good working order, the LAC told me informally as I scribbled my name on the sheet of paper on the clipboard to sign off the plane for the ground crew. No problems, nothing to worry about. Take her out and bring her home. Our last raid had been six nights earlier, on the dockyards in Brest, where we had been trying to hit the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, so I felt a little out of practice as we went through the rote of pre-flight technical and arming checks. Both engines started at the first attempt. A good sign.
As we were taxiing down from dispersal to the take-off point it seemed to me that the plane felt heavier than usual, but I knew we were carrying a full load of fuel and bombs. I ran the engines up and down, clearing their throats, kicked the rudder left and right, feeling the aircraft responding sluggishly. Tonight was what Bomber Command called a maximum effort. A runway marshal gave me the thumbs-up as we lumbered past him, then turned away with his head bent over and his hand clamped down on his cap. The slipstream from our props bashed against him. Ahead of us was M-Mother with Derek Hanton at the controls - I’d known Derek since the days of the University Air Squadron. Behind us and to the side other Wellingtons were rolling forward from their dispersal positions, turning laboriously on to the side runway, taxiing down, ready to take off. On the other side of the main runway I could see a similar procession of slow-moving aircraft, a gathering of might, ready to go. We passed the caravan where the airfield controller had his station. No lights showed.
As usual, a little crowd had gathered at the end of the main runway to wave us off: WAAFs, ground crew, station officers, all turned out to watch us leave. Every night there would be someone there, standing against the perimeter fence where a great thicket of trees pressed close to the edge of the airfield. M-Mother rolled forward, turned on to the main runway, propellers blurring, flattening and shaking the grass in the slipstream. Derek accelerated away slowly. Another Wellington from the side runway opposite moved across to take his place. At last our turn came and I pushed the Wellington forward, swung her around to face down the long concrete strip. The airsock was slack.