I took my helmet and wandered down the corridor, flanked with the numbers of the bedrooms of bachelor officers long since posted elsewhere. From the doorway of seventeen, a bar of light shone out into the passage. As I entered the room an old man rose from his knees in front of the fireplace. He gave me a start. Mess stewards are usually RAF enlisted men. This one was near seventy and obviously a locally recruited civilian employee.
“Good evening, sir,” he said. “I’m Joe, sir. I’m the mess steward.”
“Yes, Joe, Mr. Marks told me about you. Sorry to cause you so much trouble at this hour of the night. I just dropped in, as you might say.”
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“Yes, Mr. Marks told me. I’ll have your room ready directly. Soon as this fire burns up, it’ll be quite cozy.”
The chill had not been taken off the room and I shivered in the nylon flying suit. I should have asked Marks for the loan of a sweater but had forgotten.
I elected to take my lonely evening meal in my room, and while Joe went to fetch it, I had a quick bath, for the water was by then reasonably hot. While I toweled myself down and wrapped round me the old but warm dressing gown that old Joe had brought with him, he set out a small table and placed a plate of sizzling bacon and eggs on it. By then the room was comfortably warm, the coal fire burning brightly, the curtains drawn. While I ate, which took only a few minutes, for I was ravenously hungry, the old steward stayed to talk.
“You been here long, Joe?” I asked him, more out of politeness than genuine curiosity.
“Oh, yes, sir, nigh on twenty years; since just before the war, when the station opened.”
“You’ve seen some changes, eh? Wasn’t always like this.”
“That it wasn’t, sir, that it wasn’t.” And he told me of the days when the rooms were crammed with eager young pilots, the dining room noisy with the clatter of plates and cutlery, the bar roaring with bawdy songs; of months and years when the sky above the airfield crackled and snarled to the sound of piston engines driving planes to war and bringing them back again.
While he talked I emptied the remainder of the half-bottle of red wine he had brought from the bar store. A very good steward was Joe. After finishing, I rose from the table, fished a cigarette from the pocket of my flying suit, lit it and sauntered round the room. The steward began to tidy up the plates and the glass from the table. I halted before an old photograph in a frame standing alone on the mantel above the crackling fire. I stopped with my cigarette half-raised to my lips, feeling the room go suddenly cold.
The photo was old and stained, but behind its glass it was still clear enough. It showed a young man of about my own years, in his early twenties, dressed in flying gear. But not the gray suits and gleaming plastic crash helmet of today. He wore thick sheepskin-lined boots, rough serge trousers and a heavy sheepskin zip-up jacket. From his left hand dangled one of the soft-leather flying helmets they used to wear, with goggles attached, instead of the modern pilot’s tinted visor. He stood with legs apart, right hand on hip, a defiant stance, but he was not smiling. He stared at the camera with grim intensity. There was something sad about the eyes.
Behind him, quite clearly visible, stood his aircraft. There was no mistaking the lean, sleek silhouette of the Mosquito fighter-bomber, nor the two low-slung pods housing the twin Merlin engines that gave it its remarkable performance. I was about to say something to Joe when I felt the gust of cold air on my back. One of the windows had blown open and the icy air was rushing in.
“I’ll close it, sir,” the old man said, and made to put all the plates back down again.
“No, I’ll do it.”
It took me two strides to cross to where the window swung on its steel frame. To get a better hold, I stepped inside the curtain and stared out. The fog swirled in waves round the old mess building, disturbed by the current of warm air coming from the window. Somewhere, far away in the fog, I thought I heard the snarl of engines. There were no engines out there, just a motorcycle of some farm boy, taking leave of his sweetheart across the fens. I closed the window, made sure it was secure and turned back into the room.
“Who’s the pilot, Joe?”
“The pilot, sir?”
I nodded toward the lonely photograph on the mantel.
“Oh, I see, sir. That’s a photo of Mr. John Kavanagh. He was here during the war, sir.”
He placed the wineglass on top of the topmost plate.
“Kavanagh?” I walked back to the picture and studied it closely.
“Yes, sir. An Irish gentleman. A very fine man, if I may say so. As a matter of fact, sir, this was his room.”
“What squadron was that, Joe?” I was still peering at the aircraft in the background.
“Pathfinders, sir. Mosquitoes, they flew. Very fine pilots, all of them, sir. But I venture to say I believe Mr. Johnny was the best of them all. But then I’m biased, sir. I was his batman, you see.”
There was no doubting it. The faint letters on the nose of the Mosquito behind the figure in the photo read JK. Not Jig King, but Johnny Kavanagh.
The whole thing was clear as day. Kavanagh had been a fine pilot, flying with one of the crack squadrons during the war. After the war he’d left the Air Force, probably going into second-hand car dealing, as quite a few did. So he’d made a pile of money in the booming Fifties, probably bought himself a fine country house, and had enough left over to indulge his real passion—flying. Or rather re-creating the past, his days of glory. He’d bought up an old Mosquito in one of the RAF periodic auctions of obsolescent aircraft, refitted it and flew it privately whenever he wished. Not a bad way to spend your spare time, if you had the money.
So he’d been flying back from some trip to Europe, had spotted me turning in triangles above the cloud bank, realized I was stuck and taken me in tow. Pinpointing his position precisely by crossed radio beacons, knowing this stretch of the coast by heart, he’d taken a chance on finding his old airfield at Minton, even in thick fog. It was a hell of a risk. But then I had no fuel left, anyway, so it was that or bust.
I had no doubt I could trace the man, probably through the Royal Aero club.