nodded and drank his coffee.
Sergeant Gill looked Farebrother up and down before deciding to give him his opinion. ‘I don’t reckon you’ll hear a thing, sir. See, we’re real short of pilots right now, and I don’t think Colonel Dan’s gonna be sending any pilot anywhere else. Especially an officer who’s got such a good feel for a ship that needs a change of spark plugs.’ He looked at Farebrother and gave a small grin.
‘I sure hope you’re right, Sergeant Gill,’ said Farebrother. And in fact he was.
3 Staff Sergeant Harold E. Boyer
Captain Farebrother’s flying demonstration that day passed into legend. Some said that the men on duty at Steeple Thaxted exaggerated their descriptions of the flight in order to score over those who were on pass, but such attempts to belittle Farebrother’s aerobaties could only be made by those who hadn’t been present. And Farebrother’s critics were confuted by the fact that Staff Sergeant Harry Boyer said it was the greatest display of flying he’d ever seen. ‘Jesus! No plane ever made me hit the dirt before that. Not even out in the Islands before the war when some of the officers were cutting up in front of their girls.’
Harry Boyer was, by common consent, the most experienced airman on the base. He’d strapped into their rickety biplanes nervous young lieutenants who were now wearing stars in the Pentagon. And no matter what aircraft type was mentioned, Harry Boyer had painted it, sewn its fabric, and probably hitched a ride in it.
Harry Boyer not only told of ‘Farebrother’s buzz job’, as it became known, he gave a realistic impression of it that required both hands and considerable sound effects. The end of the show came when Boyer gave his fruity impression of Tex Gill drawling, ‘Everything okay, sir?’ and then, in Farebrother’s prim New England accent, ‘You’d better change the plugs, Sergeant.’
So popular was Boyer’s re-enactment of the flight that when he performed his party piece at the 1969 reunion of the 220th Fighter Group Association, a dozen men crowding round him missed the exotic dancer.
Staff Sergeant Boyer’s reputation as a mimic was, however, nothing compared to his renown as the organizer of crap games. Men came from the Bomb Group at Narrowbridge to gamble on Boyer’s dice, and on several occasions officers turned up from the 91st BG at Bassing-bourn. It was his crap game that got Boyer into trouble with the Exec.
Although Boyer and the Exec had carried on a long, bitter and byzantine struggle, the sergeant’s activities had never been seriously curtailed. But whenever it leaked out that some really big all-night game with four-figure stakes had taken place, Boyer frequently found himself mysteriously assigned to extra duties. So it was that Staff Sergeant Boyer had found himself in charge of the detail painting the control tower that day.
At the end of Farebrother’s hair-raising beat-up, Boyer looked over to the Operations Building, expecting the Exec and Colonel Dan to come rushing out of the building breathing fire. But they did not come. Nothing happened at all except that Tex Gill finally rode over to the tower on his bicycle, laying it on the ground rather than against the newly painted wall of the tower. ‘And how did you like that, Tex?’ asked Boyer. ‘On those slow rolls he was touching the grass with one wing tip while the other was in the overcast. Did you see it?’
‘He’s clipped the radio wires off the top of the tower,’ said Tex Gill.
Determined not to rise to one of Tex Gill’s gags, Boyer pretended not to have heard properly. ‘He’s what?’
‘He clipped the radio wires on that low pass.’ Tex Gill was a deadpan poker player who’d frequently taken money from the otherwise indomitable Boyer, so, still suspecting a joke, the staff sergeant would not look up at the antenna.
Tex Gill held out his fist and opened his hand to reveal a ceramic insulator and a short piece of wire attached to it. ‘Just got it off his tail.’
‘Does Colonel Dan know?’
‘Even the guy who just flew those fancy doodads don’t know. I figured that you and me could rig a new antenna right now, while your boys are finishing up the paint job.’
‘That’s strictly against regs, Tex. There’d have to be paperwork and so on.’
‘That captain just arrived,’ said Tex Gill. ‘I was with him on the truck from London last night. We don’t want to get him in bad with the Colonel even before he’s unpacked.’
Staff Sergeant Boyer rubbed his chin. Tex Gill could be a devious devil. Maybe he figured there was a good chance that the new pilot would take Kibitzer, in which case Tex would be his crew chief. ‘Well, I’m not sure, Tex.’
‘If someone reports that broken antenna, the Exec is going to come over here, Harry. And he’ll see your paintwork is only finished on the side that faces his office, and he’ll see that some clumsy lummox has spilled two four-gallon cans of white on the apron…’
Boyer looked at the flecks of spilled paint on his boots and at the insulator that Tex Gill was holding. ‘You got any white paint over there at your dispersal?’
‘I’d be able to fix you up, Harry.’ Tex Gill threw the insulator to Boyer, who caught it and winked his agreement. By the end of work that day the tower was painted and the antenna was back in position. Captain Farebrother never found out about it and neither did the Exec or Colonel Dan.
Lieutenant Morse returned from four days in London with a thick head and a thin wallet. He desperately wanted to sleep, but he had to endure two young pilots sitting on his bed, drinking coffee and eating his candy ration and telling him all about the fantastic new flyer who’d been assigned to the squadron. ‘What the fuck do I care what he can do with a P-51?’ asked Morse. ‘I was happy enough with my P-47, and if I’d been Colonel Dan I wouldn’t have been so damned keen to re-equip us with these babies. Jesus! They stall without warning, and now they tell us the guns jam if you fire them in a tight turn.’ Morse was sprawled on his bed, his shirt rumpled and tie loose. He grabbed his pillow and punched it hard before shoving it behind his head. A large black mongrel dog asleep in the wicker armchair opened its eyes and yawned.
Morse, who’d grown so used to being called Mickey Mouse, or MM, that he’d painted the cartoon on his plane, was a small untidy twenty-four-year-old from Arizona. His dark complexion made him seem permanently suntanned even in an English winter, and his longish shiny hair, long sideburns and thin, carefully trimmed moustache caused him to be mistaken sometimes for a South American. MM was always delighted to act the role and would occasionally try his own unsteady version of the rumba on a Saturday night, given a few extra drinks and a suitable partner.
‘They say it was terrific,’ said Rube Wein, MM’s wingman. ‘They say it was the greatest show they ever saw.’
‘In your ship,’ added Earl Koenige, who usually flew as MM’s number three. ‘I sure would have liked to see it.’
‘How old are you jerks?’ said MM. ‘Come on, level with me. Did you ever get out of high school?’
‘I’m ninety-one going on ninety-two,’ said Rube Wein, Princeton University graduate in mathematics. There was only a few months’ difference in age between the three of them, but it was a well-established vanity of MM’s that he looked more mature than the others. This concern had led him to grow his moustache—which still had a long way to go before looking properly bushy.
‘I see you guys sitting there, Hershey bars stuck in your mouths, and I can’t help thinking maybe you should be riding kiddie cars, not flying fighter planes to a place where angry grown-up Krauts are trying to put lead into your tails.’
‘So