who was the only person at Warley who ran towards the mishap. Grigson quite forgot the cigarette in his mouth and when the Sergeant saw him smoking he screamed with a terrible rage and put him on a charge. He was sentenced to extra fire picket for seven days.
No one felt the vibration more than LAC Henry Gilbert, a forty-three-year-old rigger from Lewes. A Sunday painter before the war, he had made a reputation as an artist at Warley Fen airfield. His ladder was on the hard-standing at the nose when the bomb tumbled on to McDonald less than four yards away. The ladder shook and LAC Gilbert paused in mid brush-stroke. He had completed his fine portrait of Joseph Stalin wearing a crown and was halfway through writing ‘Joe for King’ under it. Later, much later, he continued work, but the last part of the lettering was very shaky.
Everyone on B Flight was now looking fearfully at Joe for King.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Micky Murphy, who had been retracting the undercarriage of Sweet’s Lancaster for the fourth time when he felt the ground tremble. Together with two fitters and Battersby he was full-length in a pool of oil waiting for the bang. ‘… And in my bloody best bloody blue.’
‘L Love,’ said Worthington to Lambert when they stopped running and looked back.
‘You dropped your false teeth, Bert?’ shouted Door’s electrician to his pal who was helping him to set up snares along the rabbit warrens behind B Flight. They had dropped into a ditch.
‘My oath. Someone will be put on the pegs for that,’ predicted Digby, looking across the airfield to where Joe for King was parked.
‘Mind your toes,’ muttered Corporal Hancock, armourer, who was winching an identical bomb into The Volkswagen. He stopped work and crouched low on the tarmac. Fleming and the other two officers of his crew, who had been watching Corporal Hancock’s work, didn’t flinch. They looked at each other but said nothing.
It took forty-five minutes to fit a new jaw in Joe for King. By that time the bomb, the inside of the starboard bomb-door and the tarmac had been hosed down by the duty crew. The ambulance had come and gone and so had Groupie, the Adjutant and the Squadron medical officer. Two firemen in new white asbestos suits had spent thirty minutes wearing looks of bleak disappointment. McDonald’s mangled remains had been put into the storage shed at the back of the Medical Section – sometimes called the mortuary – and a Sergeant clerk in the Orderly Room had sent a priority telegram informing McDonald’s father in Dundee.
Two Sergeant armourers winched another bomb into the bomb-bay. The one that had fallen was taken to the far side of the airfield to await the Bomb Disposal Team. Within an hour of the accident the aeroplane was pronounced bombed up and fully operational, but Tommy Carter, ex-police constable from Newcastle, who was flying her that night complained that it was a bad omen.
Altgarten was a small country town with nearly five thousand inhabitants. Five hundred of them had moved there since the regular bombing of the nearby Ruhr district – the so-called Battle of the Ruhr – had begun in March.
In the Middle Ages a great monastery had marked this crossroads where the trade in Flemish cloth met German iron. A fine stone bridge had once been needed to cross the stream that trickled along Mauerstrasse, the eastern boundary of the town. Altgarten never grew large, for a bigger trade route passed south of here, connecting Cologne to the important seaport of Bruges and its Venetian ships. Altgarten remained a spot on the map where travellers changed horses and gulped beer hurriedly in order to reach the Dutch border or Cologne before dark. The monastery fell into ruins, and its orchards – the fame of which had spread as far as Amsterdam – became a wilderness and were gobbled up by the town. Eventually, of the medieval buildings only the Liebefrau church remained, and fruit and vegetable farms covered the flat surrounding country and row upon row of greenhouses trapped the sunshine. There were silk factories too, and now that they were making harness in the sheds behind Frau Kersten’s farm, parachute manufacture provided work for nearly two hundred townspeople, mostly women.
The town centre, around Liebefrau church, was a cobbled triangle of seventeenth-century houses. When the military convoys passed through, the policemen had to divert them to Bismarckstrasse and past the railway station, for the heavy lorries would never have been able to negotiate the narrow cobbled streets of the old town. The war had brought great change to Altgarten, or at least it seemed like great change to the people who lived there, for few of them had witnessed the rest of Europe turning from butterfly into earthworm.
Of course the flowers and fruit on the farms had given place to vegetables, but that had happened long before the war. The disused factory near the brewery had become a cage for Russian prisoners of war while they worked on widening the main road, but at the rate the Russians worked they would be there for years. They were a dirty lot, always hungry, and they seemed to spend most of their time hanging around the town watching the gutters anxiously for cigarette butts. Lately they’d brought from door to door madonnas carved from old crates. Catholic residents exchanged potatoes, cigarettes and bread for them.
The hospital had expanded enormously since the air raids upon the Ruhr had increased. There was an annex and a training centre for Red Cross ‘Samariter’ (as they called the young trainees who did the three-week emergency nursing course). Adjacent to these buildings there was a big hutted camp where amputee casualties from the Eastern Front came for convalescence and learned how to use their new false limbs. These establishments dominated the town. Some afternoons Dorfstrasse was so crowded with medical staff and convalescent soldiers that local people felt out of place there.
Where Winkel’s was once a sea of blossom there was now a Technische Nothilfe camp, full of specialist troops ready to send heavy rescue and repair convoys to bombed towns in the Ruhr. Lately the TENOs had been building a railway siding there for their heavy equipment. It was heavy work and each night they drank a lot of Frenzel’s thin wartime beer.
The housing estate on the north side of town, intended as rehousing for the slums around the gasworks, was now occupied by doctors and TENO engineer officers, which did nothing to endear the visitors to the locals. Not that everyone complained about the influx of personnel. Herr Frenzel, who owned the best restaurant in Altgarten, never complained. The downstairs bar was always full of TENO engineers and was sometimes a little rowdy, but the restaurant upstairs was chic. It commanded a view across Liebefrauplatz of the church itself and the seventeenth-century houses beyond it. This was the very heart of Altgarten and these buildings, from this viewpoint, were its proudest asset.
The Liebefrau was one of the hall-style churches that you get only in the north. The tracery windows were extra large to let in the sparse northern light, and the roof was extra steep to shed the winter snow. Its slim buttresses ran down like anchor chains stretched tight by a stiff tide and behind it the white houses were like chalk cliffs against which it was moored.
By lunchtime the cold front and its dense dark low cloud had passed eastwards over Altgarten without causing rain. Now the whiter clouds moved gently, shrinking in the subsiding air to reveal blue sky beyond and permit golden pools of sunlight to hurry through Liebefrauplatz, finger the ancient church walls and transform the gloomy interior with its glowing stained-glass pictures. In front of the church a crowd was gathered at a highly publicized fund-raising drive. Anyone contributing two marks to Winter Help was invited to hammer a nail into a wooden map of Britain. Since the Burgomaster had driven home the first nail that morning many of the town’s most influential people had joined in the witchcraft. The map was studded with a pox of nail-heads that concentrated around London, for only the tallest could reach Scotland. A Hitler Jugend fanfare band was playing, helping with the Winter Help collection. The boys played loudly and expertly and the music was audible inside Frenzel’s in spite of the rattle of dishes and the chatter.
‘Frenzel’s Stube’ was spelled out in carved wooden letters across the doorway. The upper storeys were ochre-coloured plaster and carved black beams built upon a brick first floor. The ancient house was bent and bowed like an illustration from a book of fairy stories and the interior was