Twenty Days in the Reich (14 page)
After our meal, our luck continued to hold. Quite by accident I got into conversation with a pilot of Transport Command, from whom I borrowed a pen to address a brief note to my wife (although I had every hope that I should reach home before the letter). He asked me who we were and what we were doing here. He enquired how we hoped to get back to England, and I said we
had no idea yet. Then he announced that he was taking an empty Anson back tomorrow. It seemed too good to be true and we hardly dared hope, but this officer knew just the right people to sever any red tape that stood in the way. By 10 a.m. the next day everything was arranged for us to leave Le Bourget airport at 3 p.m., and there would even be transport to take us there.
All that I wanted now was a souvenir to take back home. The pilot of the Anson, obliging to the last, fixed up for me to exchange my 200 remaining cigarettes for a bottle of champagne at a little wine shop up a side street. I stowed this away among my kit, now no longer carried in the underpants, but in an old sack furnished by the obliging woman of the house in Hanau. Like the others, I could hardly wait for the afternoon – and dear old England.
The little Anson seemed like a toy after the mighty Lancaster, but we all got in quite comfortably, and were soon making good a steady two miles a minute into the wind and in a straight line for Dungeness. We crossed the coast dead on track, each one of us feeling his own particular thrill now that our big adventure was nearly over. Before 5 p.m., we had touched down on the grass runway at Croydon airport, where at last we were expected, and there was a rush of officials to meet us.
It took us another day to complete the formalities. Then it was a case, for me, at any rate, of saying goodbye to everybody then going as quickly as possible to base, and then home on leave to my folk, eagerly waiting and wondering!
T
here still remains to be told the sequel: the story that I was to hear a few hours after we landed at Croydon. We were taken from Croydon to London. I had little difficulty in securing permission to sleep elsewhere than in the quarters alloted, for I wished to visit my sister and allow her to be the first (after I had telephoned my wife) to hear the glad news. After she got over her shock (and the poor girl wept on my shoulder) she told me, to my intense surprise, what had hardly occurred to her that I did not know. The Skipper, Roy (the mid-upper) and Ray (the wireless operator) were all safe in England, and had not even baled out of the aircraft! From what I could gather, there had been some hitch due to Roy and Ray being off intercom after the order to ‘Fix parachutes’ and they had not heard the order to ‘jump’. By the time they had got things sorted out between them, the danger from the fire appeared to have receded. The Skipper had then decided that a bit of distance towards safety could be made. Accompanied by another aircraft from the Squadron, he had eventually made a forced landing in Belgium, and with his depleted but safe crew, had returned to base two days later.
Jack’s feelings when he heard this the next morning, were like mine, very mixed. However, the one thought that was uppermost in our minds was that poor old Ron was still missing, and unless and until he turned up, the story could have no happy ending. All that remains for me to add is that when I penned my earlier chapters there was no news at all of him. His poor wife, whom I knew quite well, was frantic with grief to think that everybody except the one who mattered so much to her had ‘got away with it’. Fortunately, I do have a happy ending for this tale. While writing the manuscript for this book, the glad news came through that Ron was safe, well and back at home.
