Silver and I had a new wireless op, Chester P. Wingate—Chip for short, or sometimes Tex because he was a full-blooded American from Texas. The USA wasn’t at war, but our Tex had come over as a sparks on a cargo liner just as the Atlantic grew dangerous: merchant vessels escorted by destroyers, civilians drowned alongside navy men, passenger lines canceled. Chip was going home on a ship that was dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe off the South Foreland Light and it went down right under his feet. Chip was one of the lucky ones pulled out of the water, and when he’d dried off, he marched straight to the nearest RAF recruitment office.

He was fluent in Morse code from his radio days at sea, and he was happy to be given a gun, too, so they made him a wireless op/rear gunner. He and I came to 648 Squadron on the very same day in July 1940, but it wasn’t until November that we flew together. He’d lost the rest of his crew on that same terrible hop when Silver and I lost Colin. Chip’s damaged Blenheim had stalled and nose-dived on landing back in Shetland, and his pilot and navigator were both killed instantly. Chip, in the back, had been lucky again.

In fact Chip and Silver and I were all that was left of last summer’s Pimms Section. We’d all been lucky before, so we reckoned we’d be lucky together. God knows we needed luck.

On 18 November we were flying reconnaissance. My other two Pimms Section crews were new to me and one of them was completely new to 648 Squadron, and though we were in freshly maintenanced Blenheims, we needed practice at formation flying. We’d been sent out over the North Sea in broad daylight, without a fighter escort. I wasn’t happy about that, and of course I’d said so and got told off by the Old Roundhead again for arguing with my superiors.

We had guns ready front and rear, but were generally loaded up with cameras instead of bombs. Now we were overhearing these German transmissions in Morse code from somewhere. The last thing I wanted for my new flight section was to run into German planes.

“How many does that make?” I asked Chip. Behind me in the cramped gloom of the aircraft’s body, perched in his bulky flight suit at the radio set, Chip had been reporting them for the last hour.

“Fourteen. Got five of ’em all at once last time.”

“In code?”

“No, in Kraut. If it was in code I wouldn’t know it was Kraut, would I?”

“Tex is physically incapable of saying the word German,” Silver suggested. He crouched in the glassed-in nose of the plane where there was a ledge for him to lay out his charts.

“I can say it. I just think it’s bad luck to say it in the air.”