When you’re there, fighting, it’s hard to keep track of anyone but your own crew. People hare off out to sea to get away, or inland to make a crash landing, or down to treetop level to try to hide, or up to the heavens to get a better shot. And when a plane is in a spiral dive engulfed in flames, you often can’t tell if it’s one of your own or the enemy’s. So a lot of my impression of that battle is based on what my crew was yelling into my earphones at the time. Silver had his head in the freezing gale out the open starboard window panel, barking instructions about which way I should turn; Chip gave us an irrepressible nonstop narrative from the gunner’s turret like an auctioneer or a horse-race announcer.

“There goes another Messer, hot damn! Doesn’t that make us official aces? I don’t know who got that one—we’re definitely down two Blenheims but I can’t tell who’s still flying. Pull her up five degrees, would you, cap’n, I don’t want to shoot our tail off! Thank you—just a mo—” That was followed by the rattle of his gun. “Aw, missed. Turn right, turn right—”

“STARBOARD!” roared Silver, and I threw the Blenheim into such a steep turn that the whole machine shuddered, and I dived to avoid tumbling into a stall. Another plane screamed past my left ear and soared away before I’d straightened the wings.

“Gonna try again,” Chip blethered on. “Here he comes, a little higher—” Another rattle of gunfire and a whoop of triumph. He yelled, “GOT YOU, TAKE THAT, YOU SON OF A—”

Something hit the turret so hard it knocked my head forward into the controls. I swam in sparkling blackness for a moment and when I came to, Silver was on his feet leaning over my shoulder, desperately hanging on to the control yoke. An icy wind howled through the broken turret.

“I’ve got her,” I gasped.

“You’re getting bloody low,” Silver gasped back. “Never thought I’d try to fly a plane again—”

“Nice work, mate,” I croaked, leveling out.

“Cheers.”

We didn’t say anything about Chip. There wasn’t anything to say.

Silver pointed ahead of us, northward.

A flotilla of German battleships were cruising full tilt along the craggy coast, black against the silver sea. They wouldn’t reach us for another ten minutes, but they were trying their damnedest not to miss out on the action.

That’s what we would have found waiting for us if we’d gone to Utsira—a squadron of Messerschmitts above and a load of antiaircraft fire below.

In the end, it was swings and roundabouts, really.

Suddenly Ignacy’s voice crackled into life through my headset.