. Night .
Hours wore by as the engines droned on and The Bulldog vibrated with the noise. Titty had gotten out of her seat to see the silver sea give way to land. A picture had been taken and she was sure she had gotten one of the bombers a layer below them, streaking along, bathed in moonlight and small as a plaything.
"Hello crew, skipper here, everything O.K.?"
Titty hadn't realized that she had been dozing. Jerking herself awake, she looked around. That will never do! Fumblingly, she raised the camera and took a shot forward, through the windscreen, of the bomber ahead of them, the only bomber ahead of them, silhouetted by the coldly burning moon.
"Everything corking, sir." The Engineers' big, pleasant voice answered for all of them.
"Hello engineer, skipper here," Squadron Leader Alden said. "Will you put the revs up, please?"
"Yes sir."
"Here comes Jerry."
A moment later, all the guns erupted, shaking the bomber like an earthquake. Titty gasped, looking forward and could just see something dark ghosting for them at a blinding speed. Sparks of fire ripped through the air outside as the shadowy form of a fighter roared over the glass canopy overhead.
"O.K. Boys?" Squadron Leader Alden asked, his voice as calm as if the bullets that had just streamed towards them were nothing more dangerous than raindrops on a summer day.
"I think I got him! I think I got him!" Tail-end-Charlie's voice broke excited in Titty's headset.
"Is he going down, tail-gunner?" the Squadron Leader inquired. "Hello mid-gunner, can you identify him?"
"I didn't recognize him, but he's definitely going down."
"All right, I see some more fighter planes, boys," Squadron Leader Alden continued. "Keep your eyes peeled."
Titty clenched. She didn't realize she'd done it until her jaw began to ache. Her eyes were riveted on the patch of star sprinkled sky just over the Pilot Officer William's shoulder. She could see them now. They were German fighters coming down to pounce like wolves pouncing on a heard of slow moving cattle. Like wolves they circled and worried until they could force one from the herd and bring it down. The guns roared, beating at her eardrums. She was shaking; she wasn't sure if it was the vibrations or just cold terror.
Down below in the clear glass sky, she saw a bomber waver, then swerve as a fireball of flame enveloped a wing. Slowly, magnificently, it tipped like a sinking ship and screamed down, plummeting towards earth. She stared after it, her eyes wide and unblinking. She had forgotten to blink.
Tiny puffs of white streamed away from the stricken bomber, she counted them; one…two…three…four…and there were no more. Her heart pinched.
It seemed like hours before the guns were silent.
"O.K. Boys?" Squadron Leader Alden asked. "Any damage?"
"Everything looks all right," the Engineer said. "My gauges are steady."
"Tail gunner?"
"O.K." Tail-end Charlie's voice crackled into the headset. "I think I winged one."
"Good man."
"Hello Skipper?"
"Hello Navigator."
"Half a minute to go."
"O.K."
"Hello photographer," the skipper's voice was for her this time.
"Hello?" Titty's voice was very thin. She willed it not to waver.
"We're fairly near our goal now," the skipper said. "Things might get a little hairy. Just sit tight, remember, there is armor under your seat."
Things were going to get hairy? Titty flinched and wondered if she could stand anymore. She stared over Pilot Officer William's shoulder, into the blackness. There was no city down there…there couldn't be. That black expanse seemed as empty as the sea.
Then something burst like a star flare just ahead of them, then another. She heard a rattle like hail against the fuselage and knew it was shrapnel. Below them, where no city was, powerful searchlights were switching on and crisscrossing like far-seeing eyes, hunting them down. She could see a glow of light from the engines of the lead bomber and below, she finally saw the city, outlined in moonlight and sparks of fire, as if it were a city of flames, not stones.
There was light everywhere, just as she knew there would be. Her hands shook so terribly she could barely unfasten her belt, but she did it anyway, scrambling to one of the open machinegun ports on a bottle of portable oxygen. The camera weighed her down like a millstone, but summoning every ounce of strength, she swung it up and began to photograph for all she was worth. There were silhouettes everywhere, like eagles winging over the flaming city. Titty didn't think; she couldn't, she was numb, her fingers seemed glued to her camera, automatically winding the film, adjusting the shutter speed, setting the aperture. She snapped picture after picture, barely hearing the click of the shutter beneath the roar of the engines and the rattling boom of the guns.
"Bomb doors open!"
The voice of the Bombardier brought her back to reality. She was there, trapped in a tiny metal tube over a flaming city with seven men who had done it twelve times before.
"O.K. Bombardier, ready when you are."
"Bombs going in a minute-"
Suddenly bright heat was all around them, a sheet of fire. Titty felt herself lifted off her feet and hurled into space; her eardrums burst. The camera was ripped from her hands.
She landed on her back on hard metal. There was glass everywhere…trailing wires. Cold air was screaming into the fuselage. She struggled to sit up, but pain shot through her. Out of her blurred eyes, she saw the Squadron Leader hanging out of his seat, half resting on the floor. The glass was gone, only the twisted metal frame of the nose was left. She vaguely wondered where her camera was.
The Engineer was struggling towards the nose, one arm hanging useless by his side. If he was talking, she couldn't hear him. He reached around Pilot Officer Williams and got a hand on the yoke. The Pilot Officer was hunched over it, hauling on it with all his might.
Slowly, it came over Titty that she was sliding across the floor, down towards the mangled nose. She saw the whole city stretching like a panorama below her, outlined with sparks of fire as The Bulldog plummeted through the flaming layers of anti-aircraft fire. Titty had to close her eyes, not because she was afraid, but because of the terrible cold wind that tore through the plane. Her cheek was against the metal.
It seemed at that moment that dying was perfectly all right. She welcomed it. She wanted to urge it on and wondered why the Engineer and Pilot Officer were struggling so hard to keep them alive. As she lay there, it seemed that the darkness gave way to whiteness, to a blue sky over a pebbled beach, to a small green island in the middle of a lake, to hills that rose with majestic dignity into the sky.
She was there…she was sure she was there. She was bathing her feet in the water, looking down through the clear surface to find gems on the sand below. In a moment, Susan would tell her it was time for tea.
Then she opened her eyes.
The city was gone; the plane was still flying; the wind was not as strong as it had been and someone was speaking to her.
"You'll be all right, darling…just look at me. That's right. What hurts?"
Nothing hurt. Not if she didn't move.
"Have we crashed?" she whispered.
"You're going to have to speak up."
"Have we crashed?" she yelled. The effort drained her.
"Not yet."
He patted her shoulder. She gasped when pain ripped through her.
She wasn't sure how much time had gone by, but when she looked past Pilot Officer Williams' bloody shoulder, she saw that the sky was gray and pink, pale and shining. There were holes punched in the fuselage everywhere and bits of light shined through them. When she looked the other way, she saw the Squadron Leader lying next to her. His eyes were closed.
Was he dead?
She fancied she saw his chest moving.
The next time she saw the Engineer, he was attempting to crank the landing gear down with one hand. The Bombardier had joined Pilot Officer Williams in holding the plane on course and she watched the engineer, wishing she could help. The hydraulic lines must have been cut through. Presently one of the waist gunners took over and the Engineer came over to see if the two casualties on the floor were still alive.
"Has anyone fired the flares?" Pilot Officer Williams called, his voice weak.
"Someone fire the flares!" the Bombardier yelled. "The field needs to know we're in distress."
It seemed forever before they landed. They kept circling; she could see the field slanting through the shattered nose. Bombers were lined up everywhere again. She could see people running, others were on bicycles, others in cars. There was a little white ambulance streaking across the runway.
At last the landing strip was lining up in front of them; The Bulldog was dropping slowly down. Titty could see Pilot Officer Williams' shoulders quivering as he held the yoke steady. She felt more than heard the shriek of wheels touching tarmac, bounce and touch again.
They were on the ground.
~o*o~
The first person who came to see her was Nancy.
"I thought I was the crazy one," she said when she walked through the door.
"I took lessons from an expert," Titty replied tiredly from the hospital bed.
Nancy laughed, "How are you feeling?" then paused. "Gosh…I wish it had been me."
"You're an air raid warden, you've seen it all from the ground," Titty replied. "I think it must be ten times worse in the sky. You can't run away. Is the Squadron Leader all right?"
"I asked. I thought you'd want to know," Nancy replied. "He'll live, but he'll never fly again."
"It can happen so quickly," Titty said softly. "Everything was going perfectly, then it wasn't."
"I know," Nancy shivered.
"Were the pictures a complete loss?"
"The camera was smashed up pretty well," Nancy said. "But they were able to get the film out and develop it. I saw some of them…I can't imagine…"
"Then it was worth it," Titty said quietly and she barely heard Nancy as she continued to talk.
"A great deal of people are up in arms, wondering who to blame for letting you go up. How in the world did you convince someone to let you go...?"
Titty was thinking about something entirely different. In one night, her view of life had changed. In one night, she had nearly died. In one night, she had tasted of death, and seen the fragile hold life had. Slowly, her lips moved, though no sound came out, For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.
"Pardon?" Nancy asked. "You were saying something?"
"Nothing," Titty replied. "Nothing at all."
Finis
Author's Note:
So there's the end of it. It sort of went out with a pathetic gasp, rather than a triumphant bang, but oh well. I do have a few other S&A stories planned, which I probably will write at some point. Don't expect them soon, however, because winter is pretty much upon us and I have an illness that gets worse in cold weather and I live in a particularly cold part of the world. I used to laugh when reading 'Winter Holiday' because that lake only froze over once every few life-times. Our lake, which is approximately the same depth as Lake Coniston, freezes so solidly every year, you could drive a semi towing a house over it and it wouldn't budge. Our town uses snowplows to clear bits of it for ice sailing. I've been out on it once, when the wind chill factor was probably twenty or thirty below (that's Fahrenheit, by the way); the stresses on the ice had fractured it, leaving huge ravines that went down through several feet of white ice to the black water below. I was expecting penguins at any moment.
~Psyche