to as the crow’s nest, was where the younger crowd generally gathered to flap and caw. Anything under the age of thirty was deemed to be young, and you were never quite sure what you were going to find when you stepped from the stairwell into the glare.
There was usually a pleasing smattering of adolescent daughters in colourful home-stitched frocks, still coming to terms with their new breasts, which they wore with a kind of awkward pride. Circling them, inevitably, would be the younger pilots, barely more than boys but their speech already peppered with RAF slang. They were always taking a view on things—a good view, a dim view, an outside view, a ropey view—or accusing each other of ‘shooting a line’. Enemy bombers were ‘big jobs’, enemy fighters ‘little jobs’; the cockpit was their ‘office’; and they never landed, they ‘pancaked’. The thing they feared most in a flap was being bounced by a gaggle of little jobs from up-sun.
Sure enough, the pilots were there, a bevy of slender young things with flushed complexions hanging on their every word. Others hovered nearby, one ear on the tales of doughty deeds. The airmen were the only ones in the garrison capable of carrying the battle to the enemy, and their stories offered a tonic against the daily round of passive resistance.
Freddie and Elliott were well out of earshot at the far end of the roof terrace. Freddie was making good use of a large pink gin, his face a picture of evident distaste at whatever it was that the tall American was telling him. Max pushed his way through the throng towards them.
‘Gentlemen.’
‘Ah, Maximillian,’ said Elliott. ‘Just in time.’
‘For what?’
‘A little conundrum I was posing to Freddie here.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ grimaced Freddie.
‘Well, it sure is for their commanding officers.’
‘Sounds intriguing,’ said Max.
‘It rapidly becomes disgusting.’
Elliott laughed. ‘I hadn’t figured you for an old prude.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,’ Freddie bristled. ‘It’s a question of…well, morality.’
‘Ah, morality…’
‘To say nothing of the law.’
‘Ah, the law…’ Elliott parroted, with even more scepticism.
‘You trained as a lawyer, you must have some respect for the law.’
‘Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.’ Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. ‘You want to hear it?’
‘Fire away.’
‘It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on St Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.’
‘I do.’
‘Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘Stay lost,’ was Freddie’s advice.
‘There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t how to put it…’
‘I think I get your meaning.’
‘Of course you do, you went to an English boarding school.’
‘As did you,’ said Freddie, ‘in case you’d forgotten.’
‘And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron, the other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you fellows would call a “press-on” type…’ Elliot paused. ‘What do you do?’
‘What do I do?’
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, I order them to desist at once.’
Elliott laughed. ‘I think you can assume they desisted the moment you opened the goddamn door. Do you report them?’
‘Report them?’
‘To the Air Officer Commanding. It’s not a question of morality, or the law, or even of taste. I mean, I’ve never felt the need to place my penis in another man’s dung—’—‘Oh Christ,’ Freddie blurted into his gin—‘but it doesn’t stop me being able to make a judgement on the situation.’
Max thought on it. ‘I don’t report them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Morale. A squadron’s like a family.’
‘You’re ready to lie to your family?’
‘No. Yes. I suppose. If the situation calls for it.’
‘Go on,’ said Elliott. ‘What else, aside from morale?’
‘Well, the two individuals in question, of course. They’d be packed off home and everyone would know why. It would leak out.’
‘An unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstances.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Elliott!’ exclaimed Freddie.
Elliott ignored him. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Three differing views. Freddie said he’d report them, you’re a “no”, and I’m for reporting them.’
‘I thought you said three.’
‘There’s a difference between me and Freddie. He’s a moralist. Me, I’m a pragmatist. I’d report them, but only ’cos if I didn’t and word got out that I hadn’t then it’d be my head on the block.’
‘So what does that make me?’ asked Max.
‘That makes you a sentimentalist,’ was Elliott’s sure-footed response.
‘Oh, come on—’
‘Relax, there are worse things to be than a sentimentalist.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Freddie, ‘you should try being a moralist.’
It was good to hear Freddie crack a joke—he had seemed strangely withdrawn, somehow not himself. Max was in a position to judge. They had been firm friends, the best of friends, for almost two years now, and in that time he’d learned to read Freddie’s rare down moods: the faint clouding in the cobalt blue eyes, the slight tightening of the impish grin. They were still there now, even after the laughter had died away and the conversation
