would make it back to base. And not one of them looked older than his early twenties.
There was a picture of the ground crew and armourers getting the aircraft ready for its mission. This was definitely Uncle Victor, judging from the pawnbroker’s sign painted on the nose of the Lancaster – ‘Uncle’ being the common euphemism in those days for a pawnbroker. He noticed that the ground crew barely seemed to have a standard uniform – they wore leather jerkins, sea-boot socks, gumboots, battledress, oilskins, tunics, scarves, mittens, gloves, balaclavas.
On the facing page was the most atmospheric picture of all. It had been taken inside the aircraft, and it was grainy and spattered with white specks where there had been dust on the negative. The curved interior structure of the aircraft could be seen, and the lettering on an Elsan chemical toilet. In the foreground, a young airman was half-turned towards the camera. His sergeant’s stripes were clearly visible on his arm, and he wore a leather flying helmet and the straps of a parachute harness over his uniform, so he must have been preparing for take-off.
But the airman was surely no more than a boy. There was no caption to say who he was, and it was difficult to identify him as one of the men on the facing page. The photographs must have been taken at a different time, because this young man had a faint moustache, while the only airman in the group photograph with a moustache was identified as the pilot, Danny McTeague. This wasn’t McTeague. This young man had a prominent nose and a narrow face, and a small lock of dark hair that had escaped from under his flying helmet on to his forehead. Cooper decided he must be Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner. He had been eighteen years old, and the crew had called him Lofty because he was only five foot six inches tall.
Cooper stared at the photo for a long time, forgetting to read about the many other aircraft that had come to grief in the Dark Peak. He felt as if the young airman were somehow communicating with him across the distance of more than five decades. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he too had been the same age as this airman. Cooper could sense himself slipping into the young man’s place in the aircraft. He could feel the straps of the parachute over his shoulders and the rough uniform against his skin, hear the roaring of the four Merlin engines and feel the vibration of the primitive machine that would hurtle him into the air. He was eighteen years old, and he was frightened.
Ben Cooper was hardly aware of the vehicle recovery crew negotiating their truck into Beeley Street with lights flashing and diesel engine throbbing. His attention was taken up by trying to analyse his feelings about the photograph, so that he was hardly aware, even, of Gavin Murfin tapping on the window, unable to open the door because of the leaking trays he was balancing.
When Murfin was back in the car, it immediately began to fill with smells of curry and boiled rice. The steam from the trays fogged the windows, so that Beeley Street and Eddie Kemp’s Isuzu gradually vanished in a fog.
‘Here’s your naan bread,’ said Murfin. ‘Dip in, if you want.’
But the naan bread sat in his lap unopened, the grease gradually soaking through the paper on to his coat.
Cooper finally realized that it was the look in the young man’s eyes that was completely different from the group picture; it was a look which made him unrecognizable from the line-up of smiling heroes. It was the blank, empty stare of a man who had no idea whether he would be coming back to his home base that night. The young man’s stare spoke of resignation at the prospect of sudden death as a German night-fighter raked Uncle Victor with machine-gun fire, or the Lancaster’s engines failed and they were forced to ditch in the icy North Sea. According to the text, Lancasters were notoriously difficult to escape from when they were in the water.
In fact, that haunted look and the grey, grainy quality of the photograph made the airman appear almost as though he wasn’t there at all. He might have been no more than a faded image superimposed on the interior of the aircraft, the result of an accidental double exposure on the film.
To Ben Cooper, it seemed that the photographer had captured a moment of presentiment and foreboding, a glimpse into the darkness of the near future. Sergeant Dick Abbott, only eighteen years old, looked as if he were already a ghost.
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