I pushed my own plane into a nosedive. Our only hope against an Me-110 was to get away from it. Hide in cloud, camouflage yourself against the earth’s surface. For a moment, behind me, I could hear Colin’s gun rattling back at our attackers.

In a Blenheim, the air gunner has to sit with his head up out of the plane in a bubble of Perspex like a goldfish bowl on a windowsill. The gunner’s turret is often the first thing that goes when the Jerries are after you. And that’s exactly what happened that night, with a deafening bang that I felt more than heard. God. The wind in the cockpit, after our turret exploded, howling around us as we sped toward the black sea below. The mess of blood and bone that had been Colin, all over the inside of the plane and the back of Silver’s leather helmet.

That missed me, anyway—I was protected from Colin by the bulkhead between the pilot’s seat and the radio equipment.

The sky went small and gray. I was diving too fast—in another few seconds the increased gravity would knock us out.

I must have leveled up somehow.

I skimmed so low over the sea, when I reached it, that the poor Blenheim’s tail wheel snagged in a swell and snapped off.

In front of us, seawater erupted like a geyser as someone overhead got rid of their explosives, and I was too close to the surface to turn away from the pluming waterspout. I had to fly through it. We lost windowpanes in the front cockpit and Silver’s charts were soaked, but we were still flying on the other side.

We were being bombed by our own planes.

We saw two Blenheims go plummeting in flames into the water around us while we struggled away from the waves.

It was the morning of 7 November 1940, and I was so stunned and spent after I landed back at our base in Shetland that I couldn’t think. I shut down the engines, and Silver and I sat in silence. We didn’t even try to get out.

Then a couple of mechanics climbed on the wing to open the hatches, and Silver looked up. He put a hand on my shoulder and said softly, “Nice flying, Scotty, as per usual. Thanks for getting us home.”

He’d taken off his gloves to rescue the charts and to use the pencils and flight calculator on the way back. His hands must have been freezing. But he made the same cheesy joke every time we landed safely—he’d be able to play the violin again. He pulled the little box of rosin from his knee pocket, the lucky charm that went with him on every op, and held it between thumb and forefinger with both hands in front of his face.

“Look, everything still in one piece.”