The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [155]
‘It was that last mission we flew before the prof bought it,’ Kit told her, referring to a member of the squadron who the others had nicknamed ‘the Prof because of his love for crossword puzzles. ‘You remember the one?’
‘Yes.’ Diane did remember it, but she didn’t know why Kit was asking her if she did with almost painful intensity.
‘Well, the thing is, that it wasn’t a Luftwaffe plane that shot him down, it was one of our own, one of the squadron,’ he stressed.
Diane felt that she needed to sit down. ‘But that’s not possible,’ she protested. ‘That couldn’t happen.’
Kit grimaced. ‘That’s the official line but the reality is that we all know that it can happen all too bloody easily, even if we never talk about it. When you’re up there caught up in a dogfight, with the sun shining right down on you and planes everywhere, you see someone coming up behind you and your immediate reaction is to go into the attack. The truth is that it could have happened to any one of us, and in the confusion who’s to know? It just so happened that I was behind the Prof and I saw the whole thing.’ His voice had dropped and he wiped his hand over his eyes.
Diane’s heart ached for him and her immediate instinct was to go to him and hold him, but she sensed that he needed to cleanse what was obviously a festering wound within himself fully, no matter how painful that process, and that she would not be helping him if she rushed in with offers of comfort to hide away what needed to be removed.
‘None of the others in the squadron saw what happened, and…nothing was said when we got back.’
Diane bit her lip. She knew that Kit’s deliberate avoidance of naming the pilot responsible for shooting down his own comrade was to protect that pilot.
‘I couldn’t say anything myself, but…hell, Di, you know how it is. We were all filing our reports, and the report was that the Prof had been shot down in combat. I had to go along with that, but I also had to fly in the same squadron as the chap who had shot him down. I began to think that there’d be another accident but this time it would be me. I couldn’t think about anything else. Apart from the poor old Prof. He shouldn’t have died. He should still have been alive. I kept thinking that he might do it again and that I should say something if only to protect the rest of the squadron, but then I kept thinking about him and how it was a mistake anyone could make. I didn’t know what to do. It ate into me. I started thinking that the reason I’d seen it was because I was going to be next. Every time I went up I believed I wasn’t going to be coming back. I kept thinking about you and how it was unfair of me to keep you tied to me when I was a goner – a dead man – and so I did what I thought was best for you. I gave you your freedom. I couldn’t tell you the truth, you know that. I couldn’t.’
Yes, she knew that he could not have betrayed a fellow squadron member by revealing the truth, and she knew too that she did understand how he must have felt, how tortured and afraid and how very alone.
‘I knew you wouldn’t accept that I wanted to break our engagement without a reason so I…I started acting like the fool I would have had to have been to have thought any other girl could come anywhere near rivalling you.’
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ Diane told him. Of course she did. The loyalty between members of a squadron was intense and sacrosanct. It had to be because their lives depended on one another. So when one of them was responsible for the death of another, then the clash of loyalties had to be unendurable. ‘But what’s changed?’ she asked. ‘Why are you telling me now what you couldn’t tell me before?’
‘The pilot concerned came forward and spilled the beans. Told the Wing Co that he couldn’t go on any longer carrying the guilt,’ he told her simply. ‘He’s been discharged – full honours. There’s no point in muck-raking and, poor sod, he’s punished himself enough without anyone else doing it for him.
‘His going brought me to my senses and made me see what had happened for