‘Weren’t you cold?’ Tim wants to know. ‘The girls always said how cold it was.’
‘I was pretty cold, yes.’
‘I can’t believe I didn’t know about this,’ says Felix. ‘I want to see it … ’
‘So do I,’ says Nick.
‘Oh, you mustn’t,’ says Tim, wagging a jittering finger at them both, his eyes twinkling as they come to a rest on Felix: this relaxed, assured,swoon-worthyman who’s been cast in his shoes. ‘No airmen allowed up there … ’
‘Didn’t you go, though?’ I ask. I’ve always assumed he must have snuck up, to have been able to show Imogen the way.
‘Not during the war, no. It was a long time afterwards that I went. The house was all shut up. We broke in. She showed me—’ He breaks off.
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘What’s that?’ he says.
‘Who showed you?’
‘Showed me what?’
‘Iris’s room,’ says Roger. ‘You were just saying someone showed you up there.’
‘Was I?’ Tim frowns. ‘I don’t recall, I’m afraid.’
It’s the way he shifts in his chair. My senses prickle with the suspicion that he might not be being quite truthful.
But then he continues, repeating himself – ‘It was years ago. After the war. The house was all shut up.’ – and I decide I’m being unfair.
‘Now,’ he presses his fingers to his scarred forehead, ‘what else was it I wanted to mention … ?’
‘The navigational instruments,’ says Roger.
‘Ah, yes.’ He turns back to Felix, quizzing him on the tools props have given him, then, the reconstruction ofMabel’s Fury, especially the navigator’s blacked-off nest. ‘You can’t just be hopping in and out,’ he says, leaning forward at the importance of it. ‘No light could escape. You mustn’t forget that. It would have been suicide for us.’
‘I’ve got it,’ says Felix, ‘I promise.’
‘All right,’ Tim says, relaxing back in his chair. ‘I’m glad. It’s important to get these things right. People will believe what they see. Now,’ he grapples for his mask, breathing deep as Roger places it to his face. ‘What else?’
‘Doverley,’ says Roger.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says, and, pushing the mask away, goes into how desperately uncomfortable conditions were there, for everyone. ‘It really was damnably cold,’ he says, ‘and there were rats all over the place. Wood rot too. Half of the first floor disintegrated around the time of the Ruhr. Or was it Hamburg?’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. But it had to be replaced, so don’t let your people have it look all just so and tidy … ’ Talking on, he describes the bland food Doverley’s kitchen staff served up, except on ops nights, when the crews were given much nicer, richer food (‘Which we of course all struggled to eat.’); then, the relief everyone felt when ops were off, when they’d pile into motorcars for nights out, heading to York for good times in Bettys Bar. (‘They had cocktails that could have fuelled a plane to Berlin and back,’ he says. ‘Oh, we had some nights there … ’) He reminisces about the songs the band at Bettys played, and the hangovers everyone suffered afterwards, drinking far too much, because none of them knew if they’d be around to drink the next night.
‘You wanted to mention the fear,’ Roger reminds him. ‘How young the crews were.’
‘Yes, everyone was very young.’ Tim nods soberly. ‘Children, some of them. We had gunners come in who were seventeen, then they’d vanish, gone.’ He blinks, rapidly.
For a terrible moment, I fear he’s going to cry.
But he doesn’t cry.
He keeps talking.
‘Every mission felt like a death sentence,’ he says. ‘Then you’d get a reprieve, flying over the white cliffs at dawn, and feel alive again, until you were taking off for the next one.’ He blinks more. ‘There’s a lot that gets made of how brave we all were, and of course we did keep going up. But we had no choice, and we were terrified.’ His eyes burn. ‘You mustn’t wash over that. You can’t …glamorise… it.’
‘We won’t,’ says Nick. ‘We’re not.’
‘You have our word,’ says Felix.
