Authors: Christopher Priest
The night campaign was what 148 Squadron was drawn into. In the annals of the RAF the period is known as the Battle of the Ruhr: a series of heavy raids on the complex of industrial cities in the north-west of Germany. Two or three times a week, from the middle of March of that year, the squadron’s Lancasters flew off into the ever-shortening nights to join the bomber stream heading out across the North Sea. Naturally, the squadron began to sustain serious damage to the aircraft and many actual losses.
The Lancaster captained by Flight Lieutenant Andy Everett was lost at the end of March. This was ‘E Easy’, the aircraft Torrance worked on every day. Everett and his crew disappeared over Duisburg, presumed shot down. It was only several weeks later that the people at Tealby Moor learnt that of the crew of seven aboard Everett’s plane, all but one had survived: the dorsal gunner, a Canadian called Ken Accent, was trapped inside the burning plane as it crashed. The rest of the crew managed to parachute to the ground and were taken prisoner. This welcome news was still unknown to Torrance and the others three days later, when in a grim mood they took delivery of the replacement Lanc. The call sign on this was ‘D Digger’.
D Digger was delivered in the late afternoon, so it was taxied to dispersal and the ground crew did not start checking it over until the following morning. It was a grey, rainy day, the few trees on the perimeter of the airfield bending under a stiff wind from the North Sea, not far away to the east. Mike Torrance’s D.I. – Daily Inspection – was the first he had carried out without supervision. There were already several other erks at work. Because the aircraft
were delivered by civilian pilots none of the gun turrets was armed, so one of the first jobs for the armourers was to fit and install the machine guns. It was noisy work, and with the perspex cowls thrown open the interior of the plane was especially cold and draughty.
Torrance made his way to the cockpit, because the delivery pilot had reported that the altimeter was not working properly. Warned in advance of this, he had obtained a replacement altimeter from the stores. Removing the faulty instrument and fitting and connecting the replacement was a relatively straightforward job. The only difficulty was the usual one: the cramped space behind the instrument panel, which meant he had to lie down and reach awkwardly upwards behind the panel. Torrance’s fingers and knuckles permanently bore grazes from these tricky jobs.
With this completed, he looked again at the pilot’s sign-off to check nothing else had been reported. He stayed where he was on the floor, the rudder pedals pressing against his back. Getting in and out of this position was clumsy and sometimes painful, and he did not want to do it more often than necessary. However, there was just the one line: ‘Altmeter u/s.’
The handwriting was stiff and rounded, rather like a child’s, but the spelling mistake was not unusual. These reports were often filled in hastily by the pilots, or while still taxiing.
Torrance was levering himself up from the prone position, so that he could move on to the rest of the D.I., when he noticed something colourful and flat had become wedged between the base of the pilot’s seat and the floor. He reached over, jiggled it free, and stood up.
It was a wallet of some kind, but it was made of stiff fabric rather than leather. He could tell it contained papers that crackled when he pressed the sides. There were also a few coins somewhere inside. The wallet was sealed in a way he had never seen before: two leather strings or cords were wrapped several times around the wallet and tied together in a slip-knot. It was obviously a personal possession, probably highly valued by whoever owned it – standing there in the cold cockpit with it in his hand, Torrance felt as guilty as if he had stolen it.
Torrance well knew the regulations: any personal possession found in an aircraft had to be reported immediately. He looked around for the duty sergeant, but he was nowhere to be seen. Everyone else in and around the aircraft was working hard, preoccupied with what they were doing.
Intending to hand it in as soon as he came off duty he slipped it into his breast pocket, buttoned it down, then continued with the D.I.
He had soon forgotten about it and it remained hidden in his pocket until the evening. He was about to walk over to the canteen block for supper, but as soon as he made the discovery he let the other lads go on ahead. When he was alone in the hut he took it from his pocket and looked at it properly for the first time.
The wallet, or purse, or whatever it was he had found, shone with colours: bright yellow and orange circles, green stripes woven through and round them, a brilliant red piping stitched along the sides. There was something about the colours that induced in him a heavy nostalgic pang for his past life, not so long ago but feeling unreachably distant: long days of childhood, toys he had once had, memories of a garden full of flowers, living at home with his parents and his little sister. He was now in a world where colours were drab or virtually non-existent. Wartime Britain was a country of unlit streets, blacked-out windows, unilluminated signs. On the base he and the other crew wore faded blue fatigues and jackets, beige or grey shirts, grey pullovers, navy forage caps. The planes were black or dark brown. The airfield was grassy but also covered in muddy patches and streaks. The concrete runways were long dull strips of concrete. The skies seemed permanently full of heavy clouds. The place where he lived and slept was a Nissen hut of unpainted metal, the hangars were darkly camouflaged, the main squadron buildings were plain brick and also painted with green-and-brown camouflage.
A sense of sharp and unexpected melancholy swept over him as he sat on the side of his bunk, staring at the coloured purse. It was a realization of the unrecoverable loss of something abstract and barely remembered, a feeling of how bad things had become for him, for everyone in the country, and an unwelcome reminder that the grim daily drabness of war was something he would have to bear and try to survive.
For a few moments Mike Torrance was stalled by these feelings. He was still only twenty-one years old – the life he had been hoping to find was slipping away somewhere. He turned the firm, slightly cushioned object around in his fingers, feeling once again the stiffness of the paper that was inside and the round weight of the coins. He drew on one of the laces, unwound them both and the wallet gaped open. A part of him was appalled by what he was doing: intruding, interfering with something private, but he thought that if he could find out who the thing belonged to then he could hand it back without going through the bull of RAF regulations.
He reached in with two fingers, deliberately trying not to look too closely at what was inside. He touched two small, stiff pieces of card, which felt as if they might be photographs: he glanced in, saw a blur of black and white, a smooth coating, looked no more. Beneath those were the coins: there were about five but he could not tell if they amounted to much. It was unlikely. No one in the forces ever had much money.
The rest of the purse’s contents were pieces of paper or light card, some of them folded. He shrank from prying any further but he still needed to find out, if he could, the owner’s name.
Then he noticed that on one side of the main part of the wallet there was a small compartment closed with a zip. Inside was a piece of white card. He guessed it was a service card or a pay chit, but this was different. On the card was an insignia in dark blue ink, made up of two stylized wings. They were similar to, but certainly not the same as, those worn on their chests by serving pilots on the squadron. Between the two wings, circled, were the letters ATA, the two As nestling beneath the top stroke of the T.
He recognized the insignia at once: the initials stood for Air Transport Auxiliary, the civilian organization of pilots which ferried aircraft from the factories to operational bases. Some of the other fitters said the initials stood for ‘Ancient and Tattered Airmen’, because many of the pilots were veterans of the 1914–18 war and several of them were handicapped in some way. Torrance had heard stories about planes being flown in by pilots with a missing limb or with an eye gone. Some of the pilots were rumoured to be women. Many of the volunteers had escaped to Britain when the war started and barely spoke English.
They had a mixed reputation amongst the operational pilots, who were instinctively sceptical about civilians getting their hands on warplanes. However, the four-engined Lancasters, which normally carried a crew of seven men, were flown single-handed by ATA pilots, and without the aid of radio or maps. That earned them the respect of other pilots, no matter what their background. The ground crews rarely had any contact with the ATA. On arrival the planes were always taxied to a special dispersal point on the far side of the airfield, and then the pilot presumably departed the base by some other means. The new aircraft were later hauled over to the flight stands by tractor.
Beneath the insignia was a name,
Second Officer K. Roszca
,
ATA
, and the address of the ATA headquarters in London. At the bottom
was a telephone number, on the Hamble exchange. The handwriting was the same as Torrance had seen on the sign-off form: clear, round, almost childish letters.
He stopped thinking, stopped wondering what to do. He decided to act immediately. He took one of the bicycles that was leaning against the wall outside and pedalled quickly across to the NAAFI hut, in the admin area of the airfield. There was a public call-box outside the main door.
Darkness had fallen and it was raining hard – cold drops stung Torrance’s eyes, and wetted and chilled his hands and face.
He had never made a long-distance call before and asked the operator what he should do. Presumably used to the young airmen posted to this area, she explained how much it would cost and warned him to have the right change ready. She told him he would not be able to speak for longer than three minutes unless he had more money ready.
Torrance put down the telephone. He went into the building and braced himself with a half-pint of beer from the bar inside the NAAFI, partly to work up some Dutch courage, but also because he needed extra coins. He paid for the drink with the only ten-shilling note he had, which he had been saving for his next period of leave, then carefully counted some of the change into the amount he would need. It was going to cost him a big chunk of the weekly pay the RAF gave him.
‘WHEN THE NUMBER YOU ARE CALLING REPLIES, PRESS BUTTON
A to be heard.’ Torrance muttered a thank-you to the operator. He could already hear the phone ringing at the other end. Then it clicked, and a woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’
He pressed the button and heard the coins clatter down into the box.
‘Hello!’ he said, a bit too loudly.
‘Hamble 423. Who are you calling?’
‘I want to speak to Second Officer Roszca,’ he said, guessing at the pronunciation. ‘K. Roszca. It’s urgent.’
‘Who are you, and what is it you want?’ She had an accent of some kind, pronouncing ‘what’ and ‘want’ with a long
a.
‘This is Mike Torr – I mean, I am Aircraftman Mike Torrance,
attached to 148 Squadron, RAF Tealby Moor. I need to speak to Mr Roszca urgently.’
‘You can tell me,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘Um – Mr Roszca left a wallet inside a Lancaster that was delivered to our airfield. I have found –’
‘You have my purse?’ There was a silence he did not know how to fill. Then she said with her voice rising, ‘My God! You
found
it?’
‘It belongs to a pilot,’ he said, confused in his shyness by her response. ‘An ATA pilot. The wallet is safe. I’m looking after it.’
‘I must have it back! I have been searching everywhere for it! Who are you?’
‘I told you my name.’
‘Say it again. You are in the RAF?’
Her insistent voice, her strange accent – it all added to his confusion. The call was not going as he expected. He repeated his name, then the squadron and airfield. He had no idea how much of his time he had already used, but three minutes felt frighteningly brief. He wished now that he had found the duty sergeant and handed the wallet in, but it was already too late for that.
‘Is Mr Roszca there, and please may I speak to him?’ he said, knowing he was sounding stupid, but the call was completely disorienting him. The fingers of his free hand were clenched immovably into a fist.
‘I am Roszca.’ She pronounced the name
rozh-ska.
‘It is my purse you have.’
‘You were the pilot?’
‘Yes. I must get my purse back as soon as possible. How can I find you?’
‘I thought I could post it to you if I had an address, or if I knew the airfield where you are based –’
‘No, it might be lost. Or someone would steal it. I cannot risk that. Which airfield do you say you are at?’
‘Tealby Moor. In Lincolnshire.’
‘I was there. Yesterday. I flew a Lancaster to Tealby.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I found the wallet in the cockpit.’
‘Thank you, thank you! Oh my God, I cannot thank you enough!’ He heard her draw a deep intake of breath. ‘I’ll come to Tealby, soon. How will we meet?’
‘I work on “A” flight. The instrument section.’
‘You are not a pilot?’
‘No, I’m a fitter.’
Three interruptive pips sounded, over her voice and his. The operator came on: ‘Your time is up, caller. Do you wish to insert more money?’
‘No!’ he said loudly. He shouted to the woman called Roszca, ‘I’ll watch out for you!’, but only silence followed.
He put down the receiver. He was in the gloomy semi-darkness of the telephone box, while the rain fell unrelentingly on the concrete path outside. Another erk was standing a short distance away, waiting for the call box to come free and sheltering under the guttering of the building. Telephone numbers were scratched or written on the metal pane next to the telephone, where instructions about emergency calls were printed. The kiosk smelled of old tobacco smoke, unwashed clothes and something else – the vague but familiar background smell of a wartime RAF base. He could hear the sound of voices inside the NAAFI, coming through an efficiently blacked-out window. He stood there for a few more moments, feeling the chill, holding the slim purse in his hand.