I waited as buckets of water were lowered and the suction hose drew off the liquefied silt. David stood beside me, face set, sipping his pint. His fair hair raced across his forehead in the breeze, a frantic semaphore. I watched his lips tasting the malty foam. White beads clung to the fine scars, miniature balloons celebrating these residues of his accident.

Dials had appeared in the cockpit, their last readings registered after all these decades. The trim wheels and throttle mounting emerged, a few fragments of blackened leather and the pilot’s harness straps.

“The cockpit’s empty—he must have bailed out,” I said to David, but he shook his head and put his glass into my free hand. Edward was pulling at a leather parcel, bound by rotting straps, that lay below the seat on the floor of the cockpit, perhaps a spare parachute left behind by the pilot.

Reaching into the cockpit, Edward eased the parcel onto the seat and applied water and suction hose. Calling to him, David pushed through the watching workmen. He climbed over the steel palings and stepped onto a ladder, still wearing his grey worsted suit. One of the workmen pointed to the mud that already smeared his trousers, but David ignored him and sank to his knees in the wet silt that filled the bottom of the excavation pit. Arms inside the cockpit, he helped Edward to release the contents of the leather parcel. I realised that they were holding the remains of a flying suit, jacket, and helmet. Already I could see the notched teeth and nasal bones of a small skull. Without thinking, I sipped at David’s beer, surprised by its coldness.

*   *   *

They buried Pilot Officer Pierce two weeks later, in the churchyard below the tilting steeple, within sight of the creek into which he had plunged on a June morning thirty-eight years earlier. His grave lay among the worn memorial stones of the local villagers and of six RAF aircrew who had been interred during the war. None of Pierce’s relatives was present; the only surviving member of his family was an elderly cousin living in New Zealand, but the RAF provided the honour guard that attended the burials of recently discovered wartime aircrew, and two former pilots from his squadron made the journey to attend.

Standing behind these elderly men, their blunt and polished medals on their dark lapels, I found it difficult to believe that Pilot Officer Pierce, had he parachuted safely from his Spitfire, would now be over sixty. The small skeleton in the leathery parcel of his flying suit seemed to be that of a teenage boy, some child pilot who had bluffed his way into a wartime fighter base.