We hadn’t lost a man since 7 November. That was six weeks ago, and that was a record for 648 Squadron. It is true that one night on warship escort with A-Flight we got caught in the crossfire of a naval battle. One of my propellers was blown away by antiaircraft fire from a German battleship, and they also smashed Dougie Kerr’s gun turret. But the Royal Navy took care of the German battleship, and although it was no fun limping home on one prop, I managed to land upright. Dougie, whose head stuck up in the shattered turret of the Aussies’ plane, came home with a bloody ear—he’d been clipped by a shard of flying Perspex. Not by a bullet. He’d ducked out of the way just in time.

Lucky!

The mechanics got to work on my plane and we were back in the air two nights later. The turret was harder to fix than the propeller, but a ferry pilot brought in another new Blenheim and took the old one away. Dougie walked around with a plaster over his left ear for a few days.

Six weeks and nobody even had an injury, apart from my lucky bullet on the Bell Rock Light run, and Dougie’s lucky clip on the ear. Dougie’s grazed ear didn’t qualify for a wound stripe any more than my grazed leg did, but in Aberdeen we all chipped in and bought him a gold hoop earring like a pirate.

Windyedge was ready for B-Flight to come back just in time for Christmas.

The moon was old on Christmas Eve when we walked to Nancy’s place from the airfield, crunching ice in half-frozen puddles, howling our way through “Deck the Halls.” Nobody knew all of it, so there was a lot of fa-la-la-la-la-ing. The sixpences we’d left there the night before the aerodrome was bombed were waiting in the oak beam above the bar. And that Django Reinhardt album was waiting also, waiting for me to leave Louisa another mysterious message, so she and Mrs. Warner could magically translate German code into sensible King’s English.

The war turned Christmas into hard work—London, Manchester, and Liverpool were pummeled by the Luftwaffe bombers. The food rationing seemed endless; we were told to buy war bonds as presents. But Louisa looped paper chains made of old issues of The Scotsman from the ceiling of the Limehouse, and heaped pine branches twined with ivy over the mantel, and wound ivy around the tree trunk posts holding up the bar. There was a candle in a jam jar on every window ledge, even though you couldn’t see them from outside because of the blackout curtains.

As we came marching in, Louisa started to pound out “Deck the Halls” on the piano, picking up our song, and Mrs. Warner’s wonderful old contralto pulled our fa-la-las into line.