Body

ECHOES OF WAR

I came down to breakfast on my fortieth birthday, feeling rather depressed. I had noticed while taking a shower a few extra strands of grey in my hair. And my waistline appeared to be thickening. But these minor concerns were overridden by worries about the state of my advertising business. Nevertheless I was pleased to see colourful birthday cards on the breakfast table, left there by my children, Christine, eleven, and Peter, eight, before they went to school. For no obvious reason I was reminded of an occasion some five years previously, when Peter, his tiny hand in mine as we walked, had enquired: <Why is that car red, Daddy? And why is that one green? And why is that one blue?' To take his mind off his juvenile questioning I had bought him an ice-cream.

There was no greetings card from my wife, Helen.

The children had left the TV on. A commercial devised by my own advertising agency was showing. Made in black and white to represent the war-time period, it featured a Lancaster heavy bomber taxying in at an RAF airfield. The pilot climbs out, takes off his flying helmet, revealing a glossy head of luxuriant wavy hair and says cheerily: <Citrus Shampoo bombs dandruff right out of existence.'

Helen, coming into the kitchen at that moment, looking tired and bedraggled in her white towelling bathrobe, remarked acidly: <That ad's an insult to your father. It's almost as ghastly as your Baked Beans commercial.'

Her first criticism related to the fact that my father had served as an RAF pilot during the Second World War. The second referred to a parody of Star Trek my agency had created for a client in which the captain is beaned up to his space ship accompanied by heavy sounds of flatulence. It had been hugely enjoyed by juvenile viewers. Helen thought it rather coarse. She has never really understood advertising.

I shrugged and started to butter some toast. But as I reached for the marmalade, she remarked in a strained but subdued voice that the previous week I had been seen in a West End hotel with my secretary, when I should have been in Birmingham attending an advertising conference. The absence of a birthday card was thus explained.

I continued carefully spreading marmalade on my toast. Helen's deceptive calm suddenly disintegrated and she began hurling hysterical abuse at me, until, unable to stand it any longer, I stood up and announced: <Goodbye, Helen. I've had enough. I'm leaving.'

Seeming to levitate up the stairs in my haste to get away, I found a canvas grip in a cupboard, stuffed it with socks, underpants and shirts and drove at high speed along the M-40 to my office in town, where a further unpleasant surprise awaited me. The girl at the desk was frantically signalling at me with her eyes. A tall, bespectacled, preoccupied-looking man carrying a Vuitton briefcase stood waiting in the reception area. On seeing me, he informed me politely that my business, Colgate and Baldini, was about to be taken over by the Official Receiver. An hour later, having surrendered the keys to my office and my Jaguar - it was the latter which hurt most I made my way, crushed and humiliated, to the nearest pub.

Many drinks later, I was absorbed in watching the green stems of the roses on the wallpaper entwining in a slow-motion mating act, when I heard a gravelly voice saying: <What's eating you Charlie Toothpaste?'

Clive Jarvis, a journalist friend, had used a nickname I have always hated. He had called in at the Rose and Crown to kill time before flying up to attend a Scottish Conservative Party conference in Glasgow.

I looked up at him, bleary-eyed, and found myself launching into a rambling explanation of how my family name had been acquired. My great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee from Russian pogroms, was asked by the Immigration Officer to sign his name when he arrived in England. Instead of Colchinski, he wrote down the name he had seen on a tube of toothpaste in the washroom on the boat, having decided that an English name would serve him better in his adopted country than a Russian one. <So you see,' I added, waving my arms, <my ancestor lost his name and found a country. But I've just lost everything my home, my wife, my family not to mention the business for which I've sweated most of my life.'

Clive tried his best, but failed, to persuade me to go home. He then very decently offered me the use of his flat for a couple of days while he was away.

The following morning, after waking in strange surroundings, I discovered some aspirins in a cupboard in the kitchen and made myself a cup of strong coffee. By now it had dawned on me that the dreaded mid-life crisis had arrived with a vengeance.

I wandered around the flat. The furniture, saved from Clive's two failed marriages, was old and battered. Newspapers littered the living-room, many of them weeks old. A large Victorian mahogany bookcase containing books, mainly about history and politicians, extended across one wall. I lifted up a sash window to let in some air. Outside, traffic was beginning to move.

On my way back to the bedroom, I recalled the events of the previous day. Helen's criticism of my work had been quite unfair. The Citrus Hair Shampoo commercial had been highly praised by our clients and had increased sales in a highly competitive market. Her suggestion that I had belittled my father, who if I remember correctly had flown in Coastal not Bomber Command simply wasn't valid. It hurt, too, when I remembered that since my mother died Helen's relationship with my father had been much warmer than my own.

While unpacking the grip, I noticed a bulge in the side pocket. By a curious coincidence, in my haste to get away I had taken a bag in which Helen had stored my father's Royal Air Force flying logbook. I took it out and examined it. The name Alex Colgate was written in faded lettering on the front cover. There were also a number of small red notebooks in which he had kept a wartime diary. I glanced at the untidy handwriting and then opened the logbook. Tucked inside was a photograph of a shrine to a Japanese kamikaze pilot I had taken a few years previously while attending a marketing conference in Tokyo.

I felt certain I would never go back to Helen. Our marriage had been deteriorating for a long time. The grim realisation came to me that all I owned in the world consisted of the clothes I stood up in and these few pitiful scraps of wartime memorabilia.

Going back into the sitting room, I noticed that Clive had left one of the tools of his trade, a tape-recorder, lying on the table. I lifted it up, pressed the Record button and said: <My advertising agency is bust. The family home I used as collateral for my business debts is under threat. My marriage is over. Annotating the diaries I have just discovered will help to take my mind off my troubles.'

<And now for a confession. I owe the success I formerly had in my career to an imaginary pet mouse who has never failed to keep me supplied with interesting concepts for advertisements. I had once intended to use him as the company logo. But needing a more powerful image, I decided instead to use a rather menacing-looking leopard. But in fact Mr Mouse played a vitally important part in building up the agency. He was my Muse, my inspiration and my guru. Out of a superstitious fear that he might one day desert me I invariably address him respectfully as <Mister'.

My father, incidentally, was also superstitious he once told me that when he flew on operational missions during the war he always wore a very old, matted and frayed polo-necked jumper his mother had knitted for him.

<The eleven red notebooks I have in front of me offer the challenge of catching the echoes of that far distant war. Doing so will require a technique very different from the skills I normally use. But here goes...

<Mr Mouse, come out of your hiding place I need you more than ever now.'

I am continuing my mouse-inspired soliloquy in a shabby rented room in Kilburn, having persuaded Clive Jarvis to lend me his tape-recorder. When, as I was about to leave I told him that I intended to edit my father's diaries, he assured me that I was wasting my time. But I have to do something to keep myself occupied. I am hoping that the result of my labours may appeal to my children when they are older.Clive, incidentally, writes rattling good commentaries on politics. To be insulted by him is rated almost as highly by politicians as an appearance on television.

I can see a long rent in the shadow of the net curtains thrown by the yellow light of the street lamp. I am angry and disappointed because my former secretary and girl friend, Candy, has let me down. I hadn't realised just how keen I was on her until I heard her husky voice murmuring regrets over the telephone.

I have been trying to take my mind off my problems by reading the notebooks I found in the grip. It is a strange experience seeing the world of long ago through my father's eyes. By an effort of the imagination, I can go back into my own past and see his balding head and powerful shoulders below me as he bounces my two-year old self up and down in our garden near Teddington. The blaring of a car horn in the street outside soon jolts me back into the present.

My father took up civil flying after the war and was employed by an airline. He loves classical music and once commented how surprising it was that so little descriptive music had been written about flying, adding humorously: <Perhaps composers believe they might make the audience airsick.' He enjoyed his profession and was fond of saying that when things went wrong he earned his year's pay in a few minutes.

It is not all that easy for me to visualise my father as a war-time pilot. The first impression I get from reading the diaries is that he was an extremely callow eighteen-year old. As he accumulates experience his notes, written in an untidy scrawl, become more guarded. I try hard to read between the lines. But because it all happened so long ago in such different circumstances it is not easy to penetrate his mind. He writes naively at one stage that his purpose in writing a diary is to pass on his experiences to posterity. There are some gaps, which he may not be able to elucidate because both his memory and speech have recently been impaired by a stroke.

It is hard to associate the old, feeble man he now is with the eager young Royal Air Force pilot who scribbled in the notebooks. Speaking those words reminds me that I am now more than twice as old as he was when he enlisted in the Royal Air Force. I wonder if I shall ever be able to understand what went through his mind in those turbulent times.

Incidentally, in my opinion the gulf between the sexes is even harder to cross than the so-called generation gap. Recent painful experience has taught me that it is even more difficult to read Helen's mind than my father's

I must mention in passing that my father never wanted me to go into advertising. He strongly recommended me to go into aviation. When I told him of my plans, he tried to put me off and suggested journalism. Later, when I had become very successful, he grudgingly admitted that he found some of my ads <quite amusing'.

So there you are. A man can never entirely shake off his father's influence. The whimsical thought occurred to me that when eventually I commit these thoughts to paper, I should use a double version of the personal pronoun I-I, thus acknowledging his presence, which I feel intensely as I scan through his notebooks!

I now let my father take over as, with great effort judging from his tormented handwriting, he recorded his thoughts during the Second World War.

I, Alexander Colgate, resident of the seaside town of Hartington, Sussex, have just decided to volunteer to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force. The average life of a pilot on the Western Front during the 19141918 war was about two weeks. It will probably be even shorter in this present one. But enlisting seems the only thing to do at the present time.

I was aware of gathering war clouds from the age of ten onwards. Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Newspaper cartoonists showed Hitler goose-stepping into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Jewish shops, homes and synagogues were smashed in Germany. It occurs to me now that my parents seemed curiously indifferent to what was happening across the Channel.

Soon after my father's business in London failed, the family house was sold to pay his debts. In September 1939, expecting London to be totally destroyed when war was declared, he rented a house down here in Hartington, a small sleepy seaside town on the south coast of England. My sister, who works as a secretary in London, continues to live there with relatives.

There are no jobs here. But I have joined the Home Guard. I think a great deal about girls. But I am cut off from them by an excruciating shyness. The very word Sex is forbidden in this household. My father gave me a book to read on the subject. Its chief message is contained in a grave warning about the evils of impure thoughts which can cause ?nocturnal emissions". I struggle to purify myself but erotic images still beset me. In great secrecy I consulted a local doctor, telling him how unclothed girls keep appearing in my dreams and the damp consequences. He prescribed some bitter tasting medicine, his scowl indicating clearly that he deemed me quite unworthy of his medical skills.

At the moment I am deeply in love with a girl I have only seen on three occasions. Her name, I have discovered, is Belinda Brown. I would marry her tomorrow if I could. There is a slight difficulty: she doesn't know I exist!

More about her later.

My father, who once owned a series of highly profitable shops, now sells vacuum cleaners. His mood has improved recently since he has begun earning a little money. But he has been deeply depressed by his business failures.

After nine months of what the newspapers call the <Phoney War' hostilities have finally broken out. Our army has been evacuated from Dunkirk. Last week we heard the fierce rat-tat-tat of an air battle overhead. My younger brother and I ran outside. There was a series of violent explosions as a Heinkel 111 dropped its bombs. We were too late to see the aircraft. But a neighbour told us that the Heinkel had been shot down by a Spitfire. Our house suffered superficial blast damage.

The following day, exploring the nearby Sussex Downs I found the crashed bomber lying in a grassy hollow. There were numerous bullet holes in the slate grey fuselage. The tips of the propellers were bent at right-angles from its progress as it skeetered across the chalky Downs. Peering through the glass into the cockpit, I could see the control column, the rudder pedals and the instrument panel. A pool of dark brown blood lay on the floor by the pilot's seat.

This was the closest I had ever been to an aircraft. I touched its cool metal in an attempt to absorb what had happened. Strangely, the life and death drama which had taken place in the sky the previous day seemed a remote event. I learned later that the pilot had died in the arms of one of my father's friends, a Special Policeman. But I could muster up very little sympathy for the crew, who had been trying to kill us. My strongest sense was of the brooding silence of the Downs. The undignified crash-landing of a Heinkel aeroplane on the rolling, chalky slopes seemed an intrusion.

A few days later, I read an editorial in the Daily Express. It stated: <Our valiant airmen are the cream of the cream; only their extraordinary valour is saving our country from German occupation. Pilots are the new aristocrats of society.' The idea of becoming an aristocrat in my unemployed state was irresistible. I applied to join the Royal Air Force, without telling my parents.

Soon afterwards I was summoned to a series of tests and interviews at RAF station, Uxbridge, Middlesex. My mother accepted the news calmly. My father rebuked me but his anger was allayed when I assured him there was little chance of my being accepted. It was a view in which he concurred. My education, after all, had ceased at the age of fifteen.

Asked at the medical examination to balance on one leg for one minute, I lifted one leg and prayed to a God I didn't believe in to help me stay upright. But after thirty-five seconds of frenzied wobbling, my right foot touched the ground. The examiner, a flight-lieutenant with a wispy ginger moustache, grinned and said I could try again. He re-set his stop-watch. My second attempt lasted ten seconds longer than the first. At the third attempt, by hypnotising myself into the belief that I was an oak tree rooted solidly into the ground, I managed to remain upright for the required sixty seconds.

Later, I was asked by a board of examiners how far an aircraft could glide from ten thousand feet, if its angle of glide was forty-five degrees. I tried desperately to recall the properties of triangles and gave the wrong answer. I pleaded for another chance, saying that I had mistakenly quoted the distance along the hypotenuse instead of along the ground. The board conferred and then grudgingly passed me. I thought I had fooled them but my enthusiasm to fly obviously weighed more heavily with them than my ignorance of trigonometry.

Belinda is a local farmer's daughter. She works as a secretary in a factory nearby so a local shopkeeper told me when I enquired. She is extremely pretty and has a beautiful figure. I waited again outside Parsons the newsagents yesterday at eight-thirty in the morning in the pouring rain, hoping to see her on her way to work. When eventually she came by, I stood aside on the narrow pavement to let her pass and said politely: <Nice day, isn't it'. She looked vaguely puzzled and didn't reply.

I have to admit that it is the glamour and prestige of flying which persuaded me to join the Royal Air Force. I accept, though, that it is my clear duty to try to stop the German advance. The Nazis have conquered Norway, France, Holland and Belgium. Britain is next on the list. The newspapers report that German Jews are being thrown into labour camps. I fear for Greta, my mother's second cousin from Holland, who stayed with us for a fortnight two years ago. Greta is a year older than me, lissom with a soft, pouting, urchin face. She kissed me once and allowed me a brief intimacy I shall never forget.

Meanwhile, an invasion by the Nazis seems imminent. On Mondays and Wednesdays I protect Hartington water works for four hours during the night with my Lee Enfield rifle, a leftover from the First World War. I was surprised, when I fired it for the first time, at how heavily it crashed against my shoulder. But I performed well on the firing range and have been appointed a sniper as I wait for my calling-up papers from the RAF.

The house we rent down here has only a few sticks of furniture. My father blames his business downfall on the state of the economy. My mother says he showed poor judgement. When I telephoned him from the Royal Air Force recruiting centre to say I had been accepted, he reminded me that two of his brothers had been killed during the First World War and begged me to change my mind. I defied him for the first time in my life. I have gained my freedom and independence. The big question facing me now is to get through all the gruelling tests that lie ahead.

Using the travel pass provided by the Royal Air Force, I boarded a train at Victoria station on my way back to Hartington. As we passed through south London, the night sky to the east glowed a vivid pink. Goering was concentrating his bombers on the docks area. Churchill has promised the nation blood, toil, sweat and tears. His voice always sounds calm, pugnacious and reassuring. One wants to help win the war. One also wants to stay alive.

One last comment before allowing my father to tell the rest of his story: The diaries show him at the age of eighteen, carrying his heavy white kitbag on his shoulder from the Blackpool hangar in which he had just been kitted out down to the railway station, in company with several hundred other airmen wearing white flashes in their forage caps identifying them as trainee aircrew. The bulging canvas cylinder-shaped kitbag on his back is stuffed with thick vests and underpants, coarse uniform trousers and tunics, eating utensils, as well as a water bottle and a small cloth purse containing needles and thread with which to mend his socks and sew on brass buttons. He is on his way to military barracks in Wilmslow, outside Manchester, where he will become, as a corporal had just succinctly told him, <Just another fucking brick in the wall.'

Although I try to immerse myself in his experiences, it is difficult to comprehend fully that when the diaries were written the nation's puritanical conscience held total sway over people's lives. The Lord Chamberlain censored stage plays. Books were subject to strict obscenity laws. Love scenes in films were heavily censored. Sex was a dirty word.

My father describes how he and his fellow recruits were warned by an NCO that catching venereal disease was a punishable offence. The sergeant explains with relish that if a man were so unfortunate as to catch a disease, the resulting court martial would really be a formality, because he would almost certainly die beforehand after experiencing the torture of the damned from the medical profession. He then gloatingly elaborated on the savage implements which would be used to rip apart the victim's penis.

<Why do they bother with a court martial, then, Serge?' a rookie asked.

<It sets a fucking good example to the others, that's why. No more questions. Attention!'

During his basic military training, he joins in singing licentious ballads while on ten-mile route marches. He quotes from a ditty called Cats On The Rooftops, allegedly composed by Noel Coward.

?Cats on the rooftops,

Cats on the tiles,

Cats with syphilis, cats with piles,

Cats with their arseholes wreathed in smiles,

As they revel in the joys of copulation."

Even so, I don't think that he was ever completely liberated from the puritanical attitude towards sex so typical of his generation. I remember when I was thirteen, he decided that it was his duty to tell me about sex an intensely embarrassing experience for him. After drawing my attention, to the physical changes that were taking place in my body, he remarked that his own generation had been constantly urged to be continent. <What does being continent mean, Dad?' I asked innocently. <Keeping your dick inside your trousers.' He then went on to tell me about masturbation (avoid, if possible) and condoms (use whenever necessary). I felt sorry for him, because I had long known about such things.

Never having learned to fly, it is difficult for me to enter the experience of my father when he was a cadet pilot. He describes with candour the difficulties he experienced:

* * *

TODAY I NEARLY COLLIDED with the barrage balloons which protect the town of Derby from low flying German bombers. I was flying a single-seater Magister on a map-reading exercise across Derbyshire, pinpointing various landmarks on my way to an airfield at which I had been instructed to land. I reported, as instructed, and then took off again on the return flight. Soon I spotted another Magister, which I assumed was returning to my home base of Burnaston. Unsure of my position, I followed him until it suddenly dawned on me that he, too, was lost. Banking away, I found myself totally surrounded by steel hawsers attached to bloated barrage balloons. Fortunately, I spotted a gap between the forest of wires and map-read back to Burnaston, where I landed safely. My instructor, Flight Lieutenant Everest, asked me as I removed my goggles, how I had got on. <Fine, sir. No problem.'

Naturally, I didn't tell him about my moments of sheer terror among the cables of the barrage balloons!

Tomorrow, I have to go up and perform some spins and loops. A few more hours without mishap and I shall be ready for the passing-out parade at elementary flying school. But I'm not out of the wood yet. My new instructor told me in his open and friendly manner that he was still not sure if I could become a safe and successful pilot. <Remember, you'll eventually be carrying a crew whose lives will depend on your skill and judgment.'

My first few hours in the air were an equal mix of hell and exhilaration. My instructor, Sgt Rokeby (known as ?Rockeye"), briefly introduced me to the Miles Magister, a small, sturdy monoplane. He showed me the ailerons, the elevators, the pitot tube that feeds the airspeed indicator and the other bits and bobs. He is a spare, lean man with a lined face and a cynical disillusioned air. He instructed me to put on my helmet and goggles and showed me where to plug in the speaking tube. I then climbed into the rear cockpit and he demonstrated how to start the engine by rotating the propeller with one hand. The engine gave a throaty roar and burst into life. He clambered into the seat in front of me. I could smell leather and petrol. A mechanic pulled away the chocks and we started a bumpy, weaving motion across the airfield. As our speed increased I felt a thrill as the green grass that had been running alongside me suddenly fell away. Nose in the air, we headed for white-bellied clouds. This was the reward for all those months of drilling, route-marches and weapons training and the subsequent ground training at Aberystwyth university.

There followed a confusing flying lesson in which I was instructed how to bank and turn and descend and climb using the control column and the engine throttle. A peaceful silence then ensued, which I greatly appreciated because it gave me time to enjoy the beauty of the clouds and sky and the rolling hills beneath us. It seemed very considerate of Sgt Rokeby to initiate me in this pleasant manner. We went in to land.

<That was sheer poetry!' I exclaimed enthusiastically after we had stopped and I clambered out of the rear seat.

<You fucking stupid, thick-headed cunt', Rockeye replied. <Didn't you notice that your speaking-tube had come out of its socket!' He stalked away, leaving me crestfallen. Not a good start to a flying career.

I know why he doesn't like me and I don't blame him. He has seen through all my pretences. I try to hide my origins by putting on a middle-class English accent, but I lack the education, confidence and self-esteem that normally accompany it. After a further six hours of instruction it was obvious that I was about to fail. But the country badly needs pilots, so Flight-Lieutenant Everest decided to take over.

He allowed me to go solo after nine and a half hours, longer than the average.

Being branded a dullard is not so bad as it seems; it forces one to be doubly and trebly careful. Over-confidence kills more pilots than the enemy. I suppose I should be grateful to the cynical Sgt Rokeby for the advice he gave me one day: <Keep your name out of the fucking newspapers. The only place in which it is ever likely to appear is the obituary column.'

Troop movements like everything else in war-time are closely-guarded secrets. But even Winston Churchill himself cannot stop me from confiding to this diary that I am on my way to <somewhere in Canada' under the Empire Flying Training Scheme. Our convoy of ships is being escorted across the Atlantic by the battleship Revenge. There are thousands of trainee aircrew like myself on board wearing white flashes in our forage caps. Every available space on board seems to be filled. We have been given various duties to perform. But for most of the time we play cards and pretend to tell hair-raising yarns <shooting a line' as it is called in RAF slang: <There I was, upside down, nothing on the clock, when a Hun appeared out of the sun. His guns blasted my tailplane to pieces. But I gave him a quick burst and shot him down before I bailed out.' And so on.

I have been appointed batman to a supercilious Flight Lieutenant who has his own cabin. I bitterly resented his criticism today of the way I folded his silk pyjamas.

After disembarking at Halifax we spent three days on a train travelling through the lakes and forests of the Maritime regions and the flat cornfields of Manitoba to an RAF station near Winnipeg. Here, at a Service Flying Training School we are learning to fly twin-engined Ansons. The letters HTMPFFG stand for Hydraulics Trimmers Mixture Pitch Flaps Fuel Gills. It is vitally important to remember to set these items correctly before take-off and landing.

We carry out flying manoeuvres under brilliant blue skies over a seemingly endless ocean of yellow corn. In spite of my nagging, almost corrosive, fear of failure, I seem to be coping quite well. Night flying has not proven to be the bugbear I had feared. There has been one tragic death. Leading Aircraftsman Bennet plunged into the ground after take-off and was killed. It is believed that he misinterpreted his artificial horizon. My instructor commented unfeelingly while I was being briefed for the next flying detail in his office: <Bennet got his halo very early on in the game.'

In answer to my puzzled look, he pointed to a series of group photographs on the walls of previous courses of cadet pilot. Halos were drawn over the heads of those who were now dead.

The day after the passing-out parade I was posted, together with nine other sergeant pilots who had just gained their Wings, to a Coastal Command station on Andrew Island, to help train navigators by flying them over the Atlantic.

The train journey took three days. Andrew Island, off the east coast of Canada, is a pleasantly wooded place with red soil similar to that of Devonshire. We arrived in the Fall as I have now learned to call it and were shown into wooden huts partitioned into separate rooms. Having my own room is a great luxury. Now that I am a sergeant-pilot my pay exceeds my needs and I have allocated part of it to my impoverished family back in England.

A few days after we had arrived at RAF station, Albertstown, the Group Captain assembled all new arrivals on parade and addressing us in a hoarse, strangulated voice, said: <I don't want any of you chaps engaging in horizontal exercise while you are here. If you get any local women pregnant or catch venereal disease never doubt that you will be immediately court-martialled.'

The Avro Anson I am flying at present is a fairly antiquated machine the undercarriage has to be wound down manually about a hundred and twenty turns on a handle. The flaps only fitted on the later versions are pumped down hydraulically, using a lever behind the pilot's seat. The Anson's single-engine performance is very poor. Several accidents have occurred already and one aircraft has disappeared mysteriously out to sea. But for the time being we are having an easy time in comparison with our counterparts posted to Bomber and Fighter Commands back in England.

Now, after four months here, I can accurately judge the speed and direction of the wind from the appearance of the sea. Flying several missions a day in unheated aircraft with temperatures that can be as low as minus forty centigrade is tiring. Not tiring enough, however, to subdue my deep longing for a girl friend!

Albertstown is a quaint place with wide streets. The wooden houses have large verandas. There is a small harbour. In the drug store I saw a pretty, fair-haired, round-faced young girl sitting at the counter with a milkshake. I asked her which flavour she would recommend.

<Raspberry is nice. Are you from England?'

<Sure am,' I replied, trying to sound Canadian.

She invited me to her home for tea. Her mother was charming. But I was dismayed to discover that Anne-Marie was only fifteen-years old. However, I helped her with her homework.

Alcohol is totally prohibited on the island. Trying to defeat the ban, two airmen and two of the local girls recently drank a deadly cocktail consisting of orangeade mixed with glycol smuggled out of the base. The girls died. The men survived after being very ill.

Since writing the above I have been involved in a flying accident. Coming in to land, I touched down too far along the runway. The boundary fence approached at terrifying speed, I kicked over hard rudder, the aircraft swung round and there was a crunching sound as the undercarriage tore off. I quickly switched off the magnetos, cut off the fuel and ordered the navigators to evacuate the aircraft.

Summoned to appear before the Commanding Officer, I pointed out in my defence that the aircraft was not equipped with landing flaps and the Control Tower had for some obscure reason directed me to land downwind. However, this did not save me from having a black endorsement entered in my logbook.

I returned to my room and lay on the bed, in deep despair. I had decorated my room with prints of eighteenth century ruddy-faced pipe-smoking English gentlemen. Their old-fashioned appearance somehow helped to assuage the pangs of exile. But now these successful, self-assured doctors and lawyers and squires of yesteryear seemed to lean out of the picture frames, jeering at my misfortune.

Another sergeant-pilot, a small, slight timid Scotsman, Garth McDonald from Perth, accompanied me one day when I went into town to buy a wristwatch. On his advice I spent all my savings on a stainless-steel Rolex. Garth once admitted that during initial training back in England, instead of practising solo spins and loops he found a clear patch of sky and flew straight and level for the required period of time. On landing, he entered entirely fictitious loops and spins in his flying log book.

A meteorologist, Raymond Mountleigh, I have become friendly with gives me useful tips on weather forecasting and his other specialist subject, sex. He sometimes gloatingly describes the lurid details of his affair with a married woman whose husband is a merchant seaman. It wouldn't surprise me if his sexual exploits are as fictitious as Garth's spins and loops.

I was surprised to see Bud Fischer, a fellow Jew, whom I had last seen at the training school in Manitoba, enter the Sergeant's Mess the other day.

With a wide, welcoming grin, he came over and said: <Good to see you, Alex.' He had been posted as a replacement for pilots lost when two Ansons collided in mid-air. My accident had also contributed to the shortage of aircraft. I didn't mention that shameful experience to Bud. Instead, I asked after his wife.

<Ruth's fine. We've rented a little house in Albertstown. You must come and have a meal with us some time.'

<Thanks. I'd love to.'

Bud and Ruth are both from Montreal both have dark hair and are olive skinned. Bud is burly and well over six feet tall, his wife, petite and dainty with small features, was a ballet dancer. Her eyes are nut brown and soulful, her dark hair glossy. It shakes and waves when she executes one of her practise ballet movements. They seem wonderfully happy and at ease with themselves. I envy Bud. How wonderful it must be to be married to a girl like Ruth and make love to her every night.

I declined an offer of coffee, because I had a flying detail at dawn the following morning.

I walked back to my room in the dark. A powerful wind sent a few stray leaves fingering my body and face. For a blissful moment they seemed like the tender caresses of a woman.

Back in my room I re-read a letter from home which had arrived that day together with a parcel of duty-free cigarettes. My sister had quit her secretarial job in London for a few weeks to stay down at Hartington. My younger brother was doing well at school. The letter ended with my mother saying that she prayed for my safety. Which seemed odd at a time when they themselves were in danger from German bombers.

I dined with Ruth and Bud Fischer at the small house they had rented. They seem to have taken to me because I am Jewish. But I hardly merit this description, having little or no religious inclination. The letters on the dog tag round my neck stand for Other Denomination. But I sometimes wonder if this would protect me if I were captured by the Germans.

Ice was forming along the shore as I walked towards the house the Fischers rented. It reminded me of how close to death I had been that afternoon.

Shortly after being given a homeward heading during a navigation training exercise over the sea, it became necessary to change over the fuel tanks. To achieve this, two knobs which run along grooved channels on the far side of the cockpit have to be moved. They are beyond the reach of the pilot. When I routinely asked one of the cadet navigators to do this, he reported that one of them was jammed. Both navigators in turn tried and failed to move it. I leaned over and tried to slide it along myself. But the nose of the aircraft began to dip dangerously and I was forced to return to the controls.

I continued to fly towards Andrew Island, drawing comfort from the fact that the coast was now in sight. The starboard engine spluttered and abruptly stopped.

I applied full power on the remaining engine. But it was insufficient to maintain height. The navigators gave me a landfall estimate of ten minutes. Flying at two-thousand feet and losing height at the rate of two hundred feet a minute, it looked as if we might just make the shore. But soon the white-capped waves told me that the headwind had increased and I realised that we were not going to make dry land.

I flew on, complacently believing that if we had to ditch in the sea, we would somehow swim safely ashore. All I could do, it seemed, was demonstrate sang-froid and continue to fly the aircraft until we ditched.

The wavetops were coming closer. A landing in the sea seemed imminent. At three-hundred feet I heard a loud bang. One of the navigators was attacking the knob with repeated blows from the aircraft axe. With a final mighty thump he succeeded in moving the knob along its channel. I restarted the starboard engine, climbed back to one-thousand feet and congratulated the navigators on their resourcefulness.

Now, looking over the partially-frozen waters in the harbour, the message came sharply home to me that if we had ditched, we would all have perished from the cold within ten or fifteen minutes.

I rang the door-bell. Ruth, wearing a grey open-necked dress, invited me in. Bud, in dark brown trousers and a red check long-sleeved shirt, was putting plates on the table. A wireless in one corner was playing: <You'd Be So Nice to come home to.' I thought wistfully how nice it would be to have Ruth to come home to.

Bud indicated a scuffed armchair and asked if I would like one of the beers he had brought with him from home on his last leave. I declined.

<We're having fish for dinner tonight, Buddy-boy. Does that suit you.'

<Fine,' I said and added: <I nearly caught some fish this afternoon'. I told him how close we had come to ditching, emphasizing that the idea of using the aircraft axe simply hadn't occurred to me. Bud assured me that he might not have thought of it, either. But I realised he was just being polite.

He asked how things were back home. I replied: <Our cities are being bombed mercilessly but everyone believes we shall win in the end.'

<Thank God for Churchill's little island. I reckon the Yanks will soon be in the war.' He was right a few days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.

The stove meanwhile was giving out a pleasant warmth. I felt comfortable and relaxed. There was a tempting smell of frying fish. Ruth emerged shortly from the kitchen, gathered up her skirt in a swift movement, sat down next to me and asked after my family.

I quoted from the letter I had received.

Ruth announced <When Bud is posted to England, I'm going to join him.'

<Won't it be very difficult to get a passage across the Atlantic.'

<My parents know a shipping agent in New York. They don't want me to go, but they've spoken to him and he says he will try his best.'

<Perhaps the war will be over soon.'

Bud said soberly. <I don't think so. This is going to be a long job. I hate to think what is happening to our fellow Jews.'

I replied: <It's terrible. Hitler doesn't even spare Jews who fought in the German army in the last war.'

We got into a discussion about religion during which I maintained my atheistic position. Bud then started to tell me how, in the Second Century BC, the King of the Seleucids had slaughtered an elderly Jew and his seven sons for refusing to eat pork. I wasn't sure what point he was trying to make. Ruth then sent him frantic signals asking him to change the subject.

I was fascinated by her graceful movements, as she carried in the dishes from the kitchen to the table. Noticing this, Bud then commented proudly: <Doesn't she move well. Ruth gave up her career in ballet to marry me. She's a great girl. Just like her biblical namesake ?Whither thou goest I goest?"'

<I'm his camp follower,' Ruth said, giving me a saucy wink.

<She insists on coming to England because she thinks all those beautiful English women will want to make it with me.'

Bud, it emerged, had enlisted in the RAF at the end of his first year at Harvard university, the Royal Canadian Air Force having for some reason turned him down. I remarked during the meal how lucky we were to be eating so well. Food was strictly rationed in Britain because so many of our ships were being sunk by U-Boats.

<I shall get a U-Boat one of these days,' Bud remarked. Recently, we had been equipped with depth charges, in case we spotted a sub during our training exercises. He had been bitterly disappointed when his application to fly single-engine fighters had been turned down. He found it difficult, having so far enjoyed a brilliant scholastic career, to comprehend that qualities of an entirely different order were required to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes. I asked him why he had volunteered to become a pilot.

<Same reason as you, I suppose. To prevent that madman Hitler destroying us all. And,' he added with a grin, <it also happens to offer a fundamental test of manhood.'

I was challenged later that evening to defend my atheism. Bud countered my simple, straight-forward arguments with the wealth of erudition at his command, but failed entirely to convince me of the existence of a Deity.

As I walked back to the base through light snow flurries, I deplored my ignorance. But remembering how the resourcefulness of the cadet navigators had saved us from death in the icy ocean that afternoon, I decided that it didn't matter I was lucky to be alive.

As I reached the camp gates, it occurred to me as odd that Bud should address me as <Buddy-boy', a variant of his own name.

The warning against engaging in any sort of sexual activity which the Group Captain gave us on arrival at the airfield appears superfluous in this climate. Wrapped in multiple layers of woollens, we fly many hours in unheated aircraft over frozen seas in sub-zero temperatures. Yesterday, after leaving the aircraft and dashing to the washroom, I pee-ed myself while still struggling to get out of my cumbersome clothing. But even though <horizontal exercise' has been proscribed by the C.O, I have to admit that I sometimes dream about Ruth Fischer. When this happens, I wake with a feeling of extreme guilt.

From the air Andrew Island resembles a snow-clad lizard set in a sea of ice. Looking down, as I returned to the airfield today, I recognised the tiny cottage in which Ray Mountleigh's girl-friend lives. I was so engrossed in remembering his prurient boasting that before I realised it, the snow-clad fir trees on the approach to the airfield were looming far above me. I applied full power, scraped over their white tops and sideslipped furiously to lose height. Straightening the wings as the wheels touched the ground, I braked to a grinding halt just as I was about to run out of runway.

Feeling thoroughly ashamed of my display of poor airmanship, I made my way gingerly across slippery marbled ice towards the hut in which I live. Banks of snow are heaped up almost to the roof. A gust of warmth greets me as I open the door. A large envelope with messages from my friends in England has been delivered. One of them is presently waiting to join the RAF. Another is studying accountancy, as he awaits his call up papers. The third is at medical school.

Sometimes I dream about Greta, the Dutch girl whom I kissed and fondled one memorable evening three years ago. At other times Belinda and Ruth Fischer appear in my dreams, sometimes as chaste images of idealised womanhood sometimes rather less so.

I caught a bus into town in order to meet Ray Mountleigh in a Chinese restaurant. The shop widows were shining yellow through swirling flurries of snow as we passed through the main street. Ray was already sitting at a table in the almost empty restaurant when I arrived. I brushed the snow flakes off my uniform greatcoat and hung it in an alcove. He asked what sort of a day I had had.

I said, pretending resentment: <As usual the Met office gave us a duff wind We nearly ditched through lack of fuel.'

Unaware that I was pulling his leg Ray gave an elaborate technical explanation in defence of his department's error. His expression, when he had finished remained glum. Imitating his accent, I said: <What ails thee lad? Tha's looking down in the mouth.'

<It's Irma.'

<Has her husband come home?'

<No.'

Wang Ho, the proprietor interrupted our conversation. Ray studied the menu for a moment and then said, looking at me:. <No pork is that right?'

<It doesn't worry me. But how did you know I'm Jewish?'

<The Wandering Jew cannot hide himself anywhere.' He grinned mischievously and called out some numbers from the menu.

When Wang Ho had gone, Ray said: <Back home, we live on a Jewish housing estate. Not completely Jewish about fifty per cent. By gum, there was a Jewish girl there, Sophie her name was, who gave me a right good time.'

<She let you hold her hand,' I commented, sarcastically.

<She nearly gave me her all,' Ray said with a reminiscent smile. His expression slowly became melancholy. After a while, he said: <Meanwhile, Irma has me in a right tizzy.'

<You're behaving like a rotten bastard while her husband is risking his life in the North Atlantic.'

<I'm doing him a favour. There's an RAF maintenance flight-sergeant who's been trying for months to have a go at her. He'd fuck the daylights out of her, given half a chance.'

<Isn't that precisely what you're doing?' I asked curiously, as Wang Ho placed steaming dishes on the table. The smell of food seemed overpowering I had eaten little since rising at dawn.

When Wang Ho had gone, Ray whispered: <Not exactly. What happens is this: when I go to her home, she usually asks: ?Is the weather bad where Larry" that's her husband ?is? I bet he's going through hell." So I tell her: ?No, he's having a lovely day while you're stuck here in the middle of a blizzard."' She gives me a glass of bootleg liquor and puts a record on the gramophone. We dance for a while and then she'll say: ?Are you sure he's having nice weather?" I say: ?Absolutely. I reckon he's sunbathing on deck at this very moment." That seems to reassure her and we start dancing cheek to cheek...'

Ray said, sharply: <Are you listening?'

<Yes.'

He went on: <After a little while she starts pushing herself into me.' He looked around the dimly-lit, empty restaurant. Disappointed at having only me for an audience, he continued: <I don't know how Wang Ho makes a living here.'

<Go on,' I said impatiently.

<Oh yes. As I was saying... she pushes herself into me and we collapse on the sofa. It's a wide one lot's of room for a snog And I dabble for a while?'

<Dabble?'

<For God's sake, man. Don't you know what <dabbling' is.'

I said stiffly: <It must be a North country expression. I've never heard of it.'

<God, man, you don't have to understand North Country to guess what that means.'

<Okay, I can guess.'

<I'm not sure you can,' Ray said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. <I don't think you know very much at all. Haven't you ever fucked a woman?'

I examined the spring rolls on my plate and, looking ashamed, slowly shook my head.

<That's all right, Alex,' Ray said pleasantly. <How old are you nineteen? Well, I'm twenty-three....Mind you,' he added reflectively: <I had had a woman when I was your age. But there it is. Some of us are lucky, some of us aren't.' He reached over, patted my shoulder consolingly and went on: <In that case I don't suppose you want to hear any more what happened between me and Irma.'

I started eating a spring roll, confident that he was going to tell me, anyway. He went on thoughtfully: <Now where was I?'

<You were dibbling sorry, dabbling.'

<Oh yes. Oh boy, has she got lovely breasts! Firm and round. Her nipples go hard when she's excited which is most of the time.'

He added sadly: <But the trouble is she jibs at having proper intercourse. Says it wouldn't be fair to her husband.'

'She's a principled young woman,' I commented, sarcastically.

Immune to sarcasm, Ray said: <Some day I'll tell you what she does instead.'

The graphic account, however, had inflamed my imagination. I dreamed of Ruth again that night, this time she was unclothed.

Twin-engined Beaufighters are employed as night fighters by Fighter Command. In Coastal Command they have an anti-shipping role. The crew consists of a pilot and navigator. The latter sits several feet behind the pilot under a perspex canopy. He has a plotting table, navigational radar (highly secret) and a single, backwards-mounted Browning machine gun. In addition to its formidable array of forward-firing machine guns and Bofors cannon in the wings, the Beau, as it is popularly called, can carry rockets, torpedoes, bombs or depth charges. Recently, its occasionally wayward flying qualities have been improved by applying dihedral to the tailplanes.

It is not an easy aircraft to escape from in an emergency. To bail out, one has to heave oneself over the back of the seat, open a hatch in the floor and slip through the opening, encumbered by an inflatable life vest, parachute and a one-man dingy pack It is marginally easier for the navigator. In the event of a successful ?ditching" in the sea, the crew can escape through the overhead canopies covering their respective stations. I have already witnessed such an event.

There is room for only one pilot in the cramped cockpit. Conversion onto the aircraft requires the student pilot to stand behind the seat of the operating pilot and watch him demonstrate its flying qualities. Standing behind Squadron-Leader Burroughs as we took off I was impressed by our fantastic rate of climb.

<Fly round the circuit at a thousand feet. Airspeed one hundred-and-sixty,' he was saying. <Undercarriage down. Flaps down to twenty on the down wind leg. Reduce speed to one-three-five. Turn towards the runway. Full flap. Perform the landing drill. Watch that airspeed. Bit of a crosswind today. Aileron down into wind to counteract it, if necessary, after touch down.'

<Oh, bugger!' He points towards the undercarriage warning lights. One of them is red. <The starboard undercarriage leg hasn't come down.' He continues his approach. I grip the back of his seat tightly, hoping that the aircraft doesn't catch fire when we land. The grass runway, flanked by lines of unlit gooseneck flares, comes nearer. He selects full flap. The aircraft touches down. There's a crunching, tearing sound as the starboard propeller bites into the earth and we slew round forty-five degrees. The aircraft comes to a juddering halt. Burroughs switches off the ignition, lifts the canopy above us and yells <GET OUT!'

End of first lesson!

I climb over the seat he has just vacated, follow him onto the wing, jump and hit the ground with a paralysing thud.

<Why can't they do a decent job of maintenance in this confounded air force,' Burroughs grumbles, as we walk back to the hangar.

* * *

Having completed the conversion onto Beaufighters, I have been posted to Turnberry, Scotland, on a torpedo-dropping training course. This airfield on the Ayrshire coast was a championship golf course before the war. The torpedo, slung under the aircraft, has a specially designed aerofoil on its tail to guide it into the water at the right angle. Its own internal electric motor then drives the torpedo a thousand yards or so towards the ship. The theory is that three sections of three aircraft, converge on the ship from different directions so that whichever way the ship turns it will present itself broadside to one of the oncoming torpedoes.

The main runway here ends on a cliff about eighty feet above the sea. After taking off and flying over sand dunes tufted with grass it is wonderfully exhilarating to push the stick forward and skim the waves. I think to myself this is much more fun than the golfers enjoyed in peacetime. Normally there are heavy penalties for unauthorised low flying in the RAF. But here at the Torpedo Training Unit we may skim the wavetops with full official blessing.

To drop a torpedo from an aircraft requires steady accurate flying at two hundred feet and a hundred and twenty knots, in order to ensure that the aerofoil attached to the torpedo lowers it into the water at exactly the right angle. Part of our training is carried out on a Link trainer, consisting of an aeroplane cockpit set in a box which moves on a kind of bellows mechanism. The Link trainer simulates movement in three dimensions. Normally it is used to practise instrument flying, but for practise torpedo-dropping we operate with the canopy open and simulate an attack on a model ship. By plotting the relative movements of the ship and the aircraft the WAAF officer instructors can calculate whether or not a hit has been scored. The resulting plots, showing variations in height and airspeed, are meticulously analysed and attached to our log books.

I saw Bud come into into the sergeant's mess today. He is one course behind me. Seeing him has aroused the hope that I might soon see Ruth again. She had promised to follow him to England. Not that I would even consider making advances to her. I could never have it on my conscience that I destroyed the happiness of such a delightful couple. But if by any remote chance Ruth encouraged me to make advances, I must confess I would find the temptation hard to resist. I dreamed of her last night. She was dancing in a ballet called Salome, her small pointed breasts quivering as she performed incredibly lithe and graceful movements. I woke up in the middle of the dream. Is it possible to be celibate? The pull of women is millions of times stronger than gravity.

Bud, who is six inches taller than me, is rugged rather than handsome. He intends to complete his degree in engineering after the war.

Two aircraft collided here yesterday during a simulated attack on a ship, killing both crews. Flying accidents happen so frequently that they hardly qualify as a topic of conversation. The Royal Air Force does its best to prevent them by issuing a regular magazine called TM (Training Manual). It features an accident-prone character called Pilot Officer Prune whose crass errors regularly bring about his demise. In every issue his tombstone, engraved with the letters RIP appears, accompanied by an account of his latest blunder. He stands too near a propeller and loses his head. He forgets to put his carburettor mixture into Rich for take-off and crashes through lack of power. He fails to check his magnetos. He runs out of fuel and so on. In each issue of the magazine he is resurrected from his grave and goes on to make other crass mistakes. Unfortunately, pilots continue to do stupid things. But I try hard to learn from his and my own mistakes.

One regularly recurring cause of accidents emphasized by the magazine is the failure by inexperienced pilots to trust their flying instruments. If the Bible had been written for aviators, it would say: <Love your artificial horizon as you love your God. Embrace it and trust it with all your heart. Because if you don't, you will surely die.'

I was glad to see Bud again. when he arrived on the station. He seemed ungainly and ill at ease in his baggy flight-sergeant's uniform. Not at all like the man who had conjured profound philosophical arguments out of the air during our earnest debates in Andrew Island. Of course, he was missing Ruth. When I asked after her, his face, which was always slightly lugubrious, brightened up. <She's great,' he answered. <She'll be over here, if the U-Boats don't get her, about the middle of next month.'

We had a drink in the sergeants' mess. He was due to start his torpedo training the following day. I had finished the course and was about to go on a week's leave to Hartington before being posted to an anti-shipping squadron.

We swopped reminiscences about the aircraft we had flown since arriving back in England Oxfords, Beauforts and Beaufighters. I told him about the <ditching' I had witnessed while practising low level formation flying in the Firth of Clyde. It happened near Ailsa Craig, a craggy island which juts steeply out of the sea a few miles from the airfield. The surface that day was like a mirror, making it difficult to judge height. I had tucked my starboard wing inside the wing of the section leader as we streaked across the calm water, getting lower and lower. Suddenly, the lead aircraft on which I was formating disappeared completely. I climbed, turned and arrived overhead in time to see both canopies opening on top of the rapidly sinking aircraft. The two crew members clambered out. Supported by Mae West life jackets, they inflated small K-type orange dinghies and climbed in.

Three miles away sailors on board the Illustrious, an aircraft carrier on manoeuvres near Ailsa Craig, had witnessed the event. The giant vessel began turning majestically and sailed towards the two tiny dinghies. I circled until a rescue boat had been launched and then flew back to base.

<I hope I'm as lucky as that, if ever I come down in the drink,' Bud commented with a cheerful grin, when he had heard my story.

After ordering two more beers, I denounced the pilot of the aircraft for ignoring the warnings we had received about the difficulty of judging height when flying over a calm sea.

<We all like to go right up to the edge of the wire. It's human nature.'

<I don't.'

<Good for you. As they say, ?There are old aviators and bold aviators but there are no old, bold aviators." Bud added with a wry grin: <But I'm sure bold aviators have a special place reserved for them up there.'

<Do you really believe that junk?'

<No more arguing. Tell me one of your terrible jokes instead.'

I had once confessed to Bud that I used jokes in my so far unsuccessful campaign to find a girl friend. He had replied: <You're wasting your time. I won Ruth by being very serious.'

I told him about a phlegmatic British Colonel who finding his adjutant in bed with his wife, exclaimed: <Good God, Jones, you're miles behind with your paper work! Stop doing that while I'm talking to you.'

Bud smiled. But he had a preoccupied air. The war for him was a temporary distraction. He was a man with a burning ambition to become a rabbi. But his father had recommended that before going to an ecclesiastical training college he should first take a working degree. I privately marvelled at the freedom of choice money could provide.

My own family were now not quite as abjectly poor as they had been at the time I joined up. Because of wartime scarcity, people were prepared to pay a premium for vacuum cleaner spare parts. On the last occasion I had gone home on leave I had been surprised to see that we had carpeted floors.

My leave wasn't very enjoyable. I knew few people in Hartington. My parents and their friends seemed absorbed in local gossip and interminable games of bridge. I walked along the promenade and inspected the barbed wire and concrete blocks put up to impede a German invasion. I took the train into Brighton one evening and sat alone in a pub drinking beer. I went into the local newsagent in Hartington and asked if they knew a girl called Belinda, the daughter of a local farmer. I was told that she had joined the WRENS and was engaged to a naval officer.

I telephoned a friend who was studying medicine at Glasgow university. He mentioned the Second Front, about which there was much speculation, and then asked: <How is it on the Sexual Front? Are the girls falling for you in your pilot's uniform?'

<Not yet. Perhaps I'll get lucky soon.'

My father saw me off at Hartington railway station when my leave was over, shook my hand warmly and wished me good luck. As the countryside flashed past, I forgave my parents for their narrow, parochial outlook. They had, after all, lived through another great war whose emotional impact had probably deadened the effect of this present one. They were old and tired and wanted to lead as quiet a life as possible.

I wondered if I would ever see them again.

Hunting enemy ships along the coastlines of Occupied Europe is my present job. We go out looking for them in large formations in daylight. At night we fly singly, trying to find them by the light of the moon.

Last night, my eyes tired from peering into the darkness after an unsuccessful search along the Dutch coast on a cloudy night, I asked my navigator for a course back to base. All I had seen during our mission were shadowy glimpses of the sea and some golden flares descending through the base of the cloud, dropped, I suspected, by enemy nightfighters.

After what seemed an inordinately long journey across the North Sea, Denis informed me that we had crossed the Lincolnshire coast. Because of reduced visibility, I then encountered extreme difficulty in finding the airfield. It was with enormous relief that I finally made out a beacon flashing faintly in the darkness. The letters in Morse positively identified it as North Camber: Dah dit pause dah dit dah dit.

Flying at a thousand feet through thick haze, I eventually saw the dim glow of the runway lights directly below. But each time I descended the lights disappeared completely, obliging me to open the throttles and overshoot. At low speeds with a torpedo slung underneath, the Beaufighter behaves like a cross-grained, ungainly cow, reluctant to change speed or direction. I remembered as we climbed slowly back to circuit altitude that several aircraft at local airfields returning from night operations had recently been shot down by marauding nightfighters..

At eight-hundred feet, I fly along the downwind leg and meticulously time my progress on my wrist-watch, in order to achieve an accurate turn back onto the runway heading. I descend into the darkness and again the runway lights fail to appear. My powers of concentration are beginning to wane. The flickering flight instruments fail to yield a clear message. Even the letters H-T-M-P-F-F-G drilled endlessly into us during training begin to seem meaningless.

With the desperation of a drowning swimmer in rough seas, I make six more abortive attempts to land, stubbornly ignoring siren voices which insist that the artificial horizon was lying at ninety degrees on its side. Drawing on my last reserves of energy, I begin to descend for my last circuit before bailing out.

Suddenly, I catch a faint glimpse of flickering gooseneck flares well over to my left. I tug viciously at the control column and straighten up just in time. Our bone-jolting arrival is followed by a spectacular series of heavy bounces. I taxi in and sit for an eternity in the cockpit, head down, my heart pounding heavily.

After giving my report to the waiting Intelligence Officer, I throw myself into bed. My heart continues its relentless banging until well into the following morning.

Two weeks before I had been sharing a railway carriage with four other replacement pilots on our way to North Camber. We had been smoking and speculating on what life would be like on an operational squadron. One of the group of new pilots was Ted Lamb, a jazz enthusiast, whose aircraft I had seen turn into a ball of golden flame and plunge into the sea as we attacked a group of armed trawlers. Ted loved the music of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. He told us on the train as we neared our destination that he had been given a set of drums by his parents for his twenty-first birthday. It saddens me to think that they will never be played. Meanwhile, the fierce drumming in my chest continued to remind me of my trial in the darkness the previous night.

I am the only survivor of that group of pilots in the railway carriage.

Tonight, Denis Coleridge, my navigator, and I walked to the Barley Mow, a pub in a small village about three miles from the airfield. We had teamed up at East Fortune, the operational training unit, after the commanding officer had instructed each newly-qualified crew member to seek out a partner with whom he might feel compatible. Denis is a rather withdrawn, sceptical-looking, sandy-haired young sergeant wearing the navigators' single wing of his calling. He had been a Post Office engineer in civilian life. While we were having a drink together, he confided that at school he had felt obliged, because he was jeeringly called <Poet', to try his hand at writing poetry himself. I confessed that I had hated being nicknamed <Toothpaste.'

As we walked along a narrow lane in the dusk, between flat fields of stubbled corn, Denis admitted that he had given up hope that we would ever land safely during our series of overshoots the previous night.

<Perhaps you had better find another pilot,'

<You did a great job. I'm even more sure now that we'll both get through this lot.'

I was about to tell him that the experience had taken me to the very limits of my endurance but decided against it. As soon as we arrived at the pub I ordered two pints of beer. A group of four WAAFs were playing darts. One of them was extremely pretty. I smiled at her as her dart clattered onto the floor near where I was standing. She affected not to notice. I returned to the bar and ordered two whiskeys, hoping to pluck up enough courage to speak to her.

By closing time the world seemed a more welcoming place. Denis wasn't interested in the WAAFs, who by now were standing by the doorway he is engaged to a girl in London. I told him: <I'm going to speak to one of them.'

After he had threaded his way between the chattering girls, I said to the girl who had dropped her dart: <You'll have to aim better than that, if you want to become Cupid.'

<I'll never be any good at darts.'

<I'm Alex Colgate. May I escort you home?'

<Home's in Devon I wish I was there now. But you can take me back to WAAF's quarters. That is, as long as you promise to be a good boy. I'm Babs Wheeler.'

<I promise I'll be a good boy for as long as I can.'

<How long is that then.'

<About ten minutes.'

<If I'm going to fall in love with you, you'll have to promise to be a good boy all your life.'

<I'll try,' I said, humbly. <I'll try very hard, but I can't give you any cast-iron guarantees.'

I put my arm round her shoulder. Her straw-coloured hair tickled my face and drowned my senses in an intoxicating aura of femininity. She told me she worked in the transport section Approaching the WAAF's quarters, I kissed her. She responded warmly. I asked if I could see her again. She said I could contact her in the transport office, but if I was free she would meet me in the Barley Mow the following Saturday.

<If there's nothing on that night, I'll be there.'

In an exalted mood I walked back to the living quarters. At long last I had a date. Babs told me she came from a small country village in Devon. There was a vast difference in our backgrounds. But I didn't care. My boyhood ambition to find a chaste bride to whom I would come in an equivalent state of innocence seemed unlikely ever to be achieved before I, too, took a dive into the ocean. I still yearned for an idealistic union of mind, body and spirit. But a brief physical relationship, seemed a pleasurable alternative. The beautiful girl I had met that evening was real, not a distant unrealisable dream. She was intensely desirable. I hoped I would survive long enough to make love to her.

The following morning I lay in bed thinking how life had changed. Here, at North Camber, there is none of the rigid discipline characteristic of non-operational RAF stations. Drinking, smoking and womanizing are tolerated, encouraged. How pleasant to get drunk, chat up girls and behave naturally. Death is never very far away. Familiar faces simply disappear and are soon forgotten. I sometimes ask myself in amazement: Where has everyone gone? Will it be my turn next? No, I say obstinately. Fate loves me too much.

Occasionally, someone who has gone missing survives. One of our pilots who crash-landed on the shore of a Dutch island was given refuge by Dutch villagers. He eventually found his way through Occupied France to England via Spain. But he wasn't posted back to the squadron, in case he was again shot down and interrogated, which might have put in danger the brave Dutch people who had helped him escape. Unfortunately, though, most of those missing have been carried down into the dark waters of the North Sea.

Do their spirits live on somewhere? There is only one person in the world with whom I can discuss death Bud Fischer. It is a subject that is pretty well taboo here at RAF station North Camber. I had a letter from him the other day. He will shortly be joining the squadron. I am looking forward immensely to seeing him and Ruth again. Particularly Ruth.

A Beaufighter, in spite of its name, is no match for single-engine Messerschmidt or Focke-wulfe fighters. Bud still grumbles, even now that we are both on an operational squadron, because he didn't make it as a fighter pilot he would have liked to get into individual combat with German fighter aces. He hates the Nazis with an intensity beyond anything I feel. Of course, I want to defeat them. But I'm not as totally consumed with rage at their inhumanity as he is. I suppose it's because, unlike me, he is positively obsessed with religion. When we were in Albertstown and he told me that the Jews had a duty to become "A Light unto the Nations" in order to prevent the world from falling into total darkness, I took the wind out of his sails by reminding him that the darkness had already arrived.! I think that is the only time I scored a point against him. He is devilishly hard to defeat in debate.

Curiously, in spite of his old fashioned devotion to religion, he peppers his conversation with words like <cocksucker' and sonofabitch'. But he can also be very compassionate. The other day a waitress was crying in the sergeant's mess because her boy friend had just gone missing. Bud called her over and said: <Don't worry, honey. God has reserved a special place in Heaven for heroes like your Smithie.'

Afterwards, I remarked disapprovingly: <You shouldn't say things like that to her.'

<Why not?'

<She knows you're just making it all up.'

He said with an air of tolerance: <Okay, Alex, prove to me that there is no special place up there reserved for dead aviators.'

<That's impossible to prove and you bloody well know it. But why fill the poor girl's mind with such humbug.'

<One of these days it will be proven that dolphins leap in and out of the sea to remind us that we similarly jump in and out of eternity.'

I replied cuttingly: <You idiot. They do that just to breathe in oxygen.'

Bud gave a hearty laugh, pushed his hand through his head of tousled jet black hair and said: We, too, have to inhale oxygen spiritual oxygen.'

I knew he was pulling my leg. I couldn't argue with him, because he confused me with rabbinical sophistry that seems to have no relationship to real life. He makes me seem a fool, even though I'm the one displaying common sense. Later, he remarked of the waitress: <Poor Susan. She was really in love with Smithie.'

<He would never have married her.'

<How the hell do you know?'

<He was studying maths at Cambridge.'

<What the hell has that got to do with it.'

<You don't understand our class system, Bud. Mathematicians do not marry waitresses.'

<Bullshit. I'd rather have my wife serve me a good meal any day than be able to quote Bernouilli's Numbers.'

Not knowing what he was talking about, I changed the subject quickly and asked: <Has Ruth settled in?'

<Yeah, we've rented a small cottage about three miles from here on the other side of the village. The CO has okayed it. We're on the telephone and I've bought a motor-bike. It gives me tremendous confidence to know she's around.'

<You're a lucky devil.'

I told him I had a date with a WAAF.

<Great! Take it easy. Oh, and one thing, man.'

<What?'

<Don't tell her any of your dreadful jokes.'

Death is as much a forbidden subject here as sex is at home. The unwritten law says: Thou shalt only say of someone who has been shot down: <He's gone for a Burton', or <He's bought it'. The word Death is totally banned. Intrigued, though, by Bud's disingenuous attempt to console the WAAF, I said: <Bud, seriously, you don't really believe in Heaven and all that guff, do you.'

I studied intently the expression on his large face.

<There is no alternative to believing in it.'

<Of course there is!' I replied contemptuously. <All it requires is the guts to accept personal extinction.'

<That wouldn't help Susan.'

<What's the point in comforting her with a fairy tale?'

Bud drew on his cigarette, looked at me quizzically and said: <I gave it to her straight from the shoulder. No forked tongue. No bullshit. She knows it's true and I know it.'

He lowered his voice and then said: <Don't you know that a belief in an after-life is one of the thirteen principles of Maimonides. As a Jew, you are obliged to believe in the immortality of the soul.'

<Well, I don't,' I said flatly.

<Okay. Okay. Would you like a coffee?'

He called out to one of the waitresses: <A coffee for this non-believing sonofabitch.' Then turning to me again, he said: <Have you ever read a comic?'

<Of course.'

<Well, just imagine that you are Popeye in a cartoon. There's a bubble issuing from your mouth indicating your thoughts. The total image represents body and mind okay?'

<Okay.'

<Now the cartoonist wants to kill you off for this issue of the magazine, so he gets Olive Oil to push you off a skyscraper splat! So now you're dead. Okay?'

<Absolutely. Popeye is now as dead as a dodo.'

<The Dodo is not dead, pardon me.'

<What do you mean he's not dead? Everybody knows he is.'

<In one sense, yes. But in another sense he's still alive. The cartoon character cannot die while he exists in the mind of the cartoonist, nor can the Dodo. What is more the Cartoonist mustn't let him die because he has to produce another cartoon and if he doesn't, he'll be fired.'

<You're suggesting that God is a cartoonist who's afraid of getting the sack?'

<Exactly.'

<But God is supposed to be omnipotent. Nobody can fire him.'

<He can fire himself. He doesn't want to do that. He wants the cartoon show to go on.'

<That's very cruel of him.'

<Cruel?'

<Yes. He keeps creating a world in which poor Smithie is shot down and Susan has to cry her heart out because she'll never see him again.'

<But I have just assured her that she will.'

<That is sheer, heartless crap.'

Bud said sternly: <Not if she believes it and I believe it and, most important of all, God believes it.'

A brilliant idea came into my mind at that moment for refuting Bud's absurd argument. But the siren sounded and we had to scramble to our aircraft.

Wearing mae wests and carrying our parachutes and inflatable dinghies, Denis and I climb out of a crew transport van. A cheerful-looking engineer hands me the technical sheet to sign. I climb through the open hatch beneath the fuselage and hoist myself into the narrow cockpit. I am comforted by the knowledge that under my battle-dress tunic I am wearing a frayed and matted blue polo-necked pullover my mother knitted for me. All around dozens of Hercules engines are disturbing the peace of this warm cloudy afternoon.

I speak a few words into the microphone, to check the inter-com: Onetwothreefourfive. Five four-three twoone'. Denis acknowledges my call. I run through the check list etched into my mind by countless repetitions, setting the hydraulics, trimmers, mixture, propeller pitch, flaps, fuel and gills for take-off.

The engineer gives me the <thumbs up'. I start the engines and taxi out, checking the magnetos and keeping a wary eye on Sugar Victor, the aircraft taxying just ahead of me.

The limp windsock indicates that there is very little wind to shorten the take-off run. Today, however, my aircraft is comparatively lightly-laden. My section of the formation has been briefed to rake enemy ships with cannon and machine gun fire, diverting anti-aircraft fire from the slower, torpedo-carrying aircraft who will come in below during our attack on the target.

As soon as Sugar Victor becomes airborne just ahead of me, I open up the throttles. There is a swift, satisfying response from the air-cooled radial, Hercules engines. At take-off speed, I pull back on the stick and follow the lead aircraft into a climbing turn, tucking my starboard wing just inside his port wing as I catch up with him. He, in turn, joins five other aircraft climbing over the airfield.

Soon, the whole Wing, consisting of thirty-six aircraft has assembled into formation at one-thousand feet just south of Spurn Head and we set of eastwards.

Denis's <pea-shooter' the Browning machine gun which sticks out of the back of his canopy offers little defence against enemy fighters attacking from the rear. Fortunately, the Luftwaffe is heavily engaged at the moment on the Russian and Italian fronts and in repulsing the air armadas that are being sent over Germany by RAF Bomber and American Strategic Air Commands.

Wing-Commander <Tubby' Loughton is a thick-set, pipe-smoking man. Quite old. He must be in his middle-thirties. He has thinning, sandy hair and looks permanently worried as though his responsibilities are a burden to him. He told us at our briefing that we shall be going after a <handful' of naval vessels. Sounds vaguely menacing. <How many naval vessels can you get in one hand?' someone enquired facetiously.

It is rumoured that <Tubby' is very concerned about the heavy casualties we have suffered recently. I try to dismiss the thought that I might <go for a Burton'. One rarely notices other aircraft being shot down during an attack, although sometimes they can be seen in the photographs taken by navigators as we leave the target.

We are still flying at one-thousand feet we'll go lower as we come within range of enemy radar. Denis announces over the intercom that we are fifty miles from Spurn head, heading due east. The sea below is ruffled here and there by wavelets. I see a small Royal Naval frigate or is it a minesweeper? I should know the difference I obviously didn't put in enough time on ship recognition during my training course. That same ship may fire on us when we come back. I can't blame the gunners. If I can't tell the difference between a frigate and a minesweeper, why should they be able to distinguish between a Beaufighter and, say, a twin-engine Messerschmidt.

I can see the helmeted head of Flight lieutenant Tom Skibbard in Sugar Victor. He lifts a gloved hand in acknowledgment as he glances back at me. My wing is only two or three feet from his. All around me a solid mass of grey Beaufighters on their way to give and receive death and destruction. I am not frightened. Not yet, anyway. It will be at least another hour before we find our target. That gives me time to worry about whether I shall be back in time to meet Babs in the Barley Mow. I wonder how Bud Fischer is feeling. By comparison with him I am almost a veteran. His attempt to console the weeping WAAF was pathetic. How can a modern thinking man believe all that stuff about cartoons and immortality! Still, he would probably make a good rabbi. One can see him in synagogue, admonishing his congregation for not keeping God's laws. Today he is certainly not keeping the Sabbath. He's strapped to a Beaufighter, shitting himself with fear!

Having already been on a number of missions, I have become a little more confident. I believe I shall survive this one. Tubby Loughton doesn't want to lose too many aeroplanes and crews. Unless, of course, as someone inanely remarked the other day, he figures the more aircraft he loses the sooner he'll be given a safe desk job. That's an unprofitable line of thought. I must think of something more pleasant.

I dwell on Babs's lovely breasts. I felt them nudging me, when I was walking with her the other night. Her home is near Bideford in Devon. She's a country girl. Shakespearian pun there. Mustn't think on such things. It's a foreign country to me. What does it look like, feel like?

I gave Tom Skibbard a scare just then. He looks round again and waves his hand, as if to ward off the danger of collision before the big event.

My parents will grieve, if I don't return. I sometimes have the feeling that they have, so to speak, written me off in advance so that it won't come as too much of a blow when I get killed. My sister has met a Jewish American GI with honourable intentions. I hope they'll be very happy.

I am now a flight-sergeant pilot. I would like to be commissioned. Not much chance of that, though, having been to the wrong kind of school. Strange that Bud hasn't been commissioned. It is some consolation to know that even well educated people do not always come up to scratch.

The cloud is getting lower. If attacked by fighters, I'll ram the throttles into Emergency, and escape into the clouds. It would be nice to shoot down an enemy fighter in single combat, though. It is something Bud Fischer dreams about. But there would be little hope of winning in a dog fight. Messerschmidt meets Beaufighter. Denis poops off ineffectively with his pea-shooter. Beaufighter dives into the sea, burning furiously. Messerschmidt pilot goes home to his mates, boasting over a stein of beer what easy prey these British Beaufighters make for German fighters. Down in Davy Jones's locker, I become bleached bones amid the tangled wreckage and the tendrils of sea weed. Food for fishes.

I hope I don't become food for fishes.

Still, there are worse fates, I suppose. If captured by the Nazis, would they check to see if I have been circumcised? My circumcised prick is a virgin prick. Sad and humiliating to think that I shall probably go to my death without ever having had sex. According to St. Paul, Christ's apostle, it's better to marry than to burn. Did he mean burn with desire, shame, rage, humiliation? Or did he mean burn in Hell? It's all the same I suppose. I must ask Bud Fischer, who knows about these things why isn't there an operation which would supply me with a false foreskin, so that if I were captured by the Nazis they would treat me as a Christian?

Denis reports we are now a hundred and twenty miles east of Spurn Head. I tell him to take the safety-catch off his Browning gun and remind him to spray the ships with fire after we have passed over them. Every little bit helps. <Yes Sir,' he replies with a touch of irony. His girl friend in London is called Dianne. She is a secretary. They intend to get married soon. When we were drunk the other night, he confided that they haven't slept together but that he had previously slept with another girl friend. In fact, two or three. Was he just boasting? I gave no indication of my own shameful lack of experience. Perhaps he's more attractive to women than I am. Or is it that I am more frightened of them? I think, possibly, the latter.

Telling jokes doesn't appear to help. Having confidence in oneself is the important thing. However badly Clark Gable and Robert Taylor treat their women it makes no difference the women still fall into their arms, their eyes shining with love. I must throw away that book called How to Woo Girls By Making Them Laugh.

The Dutch coast is off there somewhere to our right. We are descending now to two hundred feet. The white-topped waves are sweeping past at high speed. This is fun. But I would enjoy it much more, if we were not heading towards a bloody encounter somewhere a hundred or so miles ahead. But I feel lucky. I have taken the safety-catch off the firing button on the control column. Cannons and machine guns are ready to fire.

We are getting a little mechanical turbulence now as we fly over the wave-tops. The massed aircraft all around me are bobbing up and down. Ease away from the lead aircraft a little. Awful consequences if we touch wings! We are flying in a looser formation now.

I look round the cockpit. There is a First Aid kit containing dressings and bandages and ampoules of morphia. You just inject it and squeeze. Not much use in knocking yourself out, though, if you've got to fly home. There is benzedrine for use when very tired. I could have done with some the other night, but we have been told only to use it in an extreme emergency. The fly buttons on my trousers contain tiny magnets, so that if I land in Occupied Territory, I can dangle one on a piece of cotton and it will enable me to set off across Europe for Spain. The top part of my flying boots can easily be severed, leaving me with shoes that will not give away the fact that I am aircrew. I carry a tobacco pouch, the lining of which is imprinted with a map of Europe to help me find my way. They the boffins who work for the RAF think of everything. In the inflatable dinghy on which I am sitting is a bag of chemicals which will give off warmth when immersed in sea water, to keep the cold out for a couple of hours as one waits to be rescued. With luck a great deal of luck an Air Sea Rescue squadron will find us and drop a small boat containing provisions. But a tiny orange dinghy is incredibly hard to find.

I had better talk to Denis. Boost his morale. Boost my own as well. <How are you feeling, Denis? Everything ship-shape?'

<Fine. I thought the butterflies had gone with the summer but I have some in my stomach.'

<Don't worry. We'll be down and up again like a whore's drawers. How far have we got to go?'

<I reckon another three-quarters of an hour.'

<How's your mother?' She had been injured getting off a bus.

<Much better. Her broken wrist is on the mend.'

<That's good. Looking forward to the wedding?'

<That's if I make it.'

<You'll make it alright. Poet and Toothpaste will live to fight another day.'

<Okay, Mr. Toothpaste. How did you get on with that WAAF the other day.'

<I have a date tonight.'

<Fly carefully and you might even make it.'

I grunt in reply. I don't need that sort of advice. My annoyance soon fades, however. Denis is just warning me not to write us both off through sheer bravado. He wants to attend his own wedding. I can't blame him.

What's the difference between bravado and bravery? Bravery, I suppose, is getting stuck in, but weaving and dodging the flack at the same time. Bravado is totally ignoring it. I can see Denis's point.

I think again about Babs. She is plump, sensuous and pretty. I am a little in love with her. But she wouldn't be comfortable with my parents and their bridge-playing friends in Hartington. Their precipitate descent into poverty has hurt my parents' class pride. My mother said once: <Just because we have lost all our money doesn't mean that we are working class.'

Belinda remains a semi-forgotten dream of my adolescence. But she touched a chord in my being. She reminds me of Katharine Hepburn with a dash of Merle Oberon. Per Ardua Ad Astra is the motto of the Royal Air Force Through Struggle To The Stars. But it's easier to get to the stars than to get near a film star, or even someone like Belinda who looks like a film star. The one girl whom I would like to marry is, unfortunately, already married and what's more to someone who's a near genius. That leaves Babs. She's very pretty and physically very appealing. But it's stupid to think about anything beyond our date tonight.

The sea surface has become smooth and milky almost opalescent in places. We are no longer bobbing around in slight turbulence. All thirty-six aircraft have closed in again as though for mutual protection. Pile on a little more power. The airspeed had just gone over one-hundred and eighty miles per hour. We are like the proverbial dogs of war straining at the leash. Tubby Loughton is obviously keen to get it over with. Perhaps he's anxious to get back to his pet fox, the squadron mascot. One of the airmen keeps it in a pen in one of the hangars. Will the fox pine if Tubby gets shot down? They say that foxes can get very devoted to human beings...

<I had a bash at a warship of some kind. It was pumping up a hell of a lot of flak.' I am being debriefed by an Intelligence Officer.

<How many ships were there?'

<Four, I think.'

<Which one did you attack.'

<The most northerly one. The one furthest from Heli-goland.'

<Did you see any of our aircraft go down?'

<No, but my navigator did. How many did we lose?'

The Intelligence Officer, a long stringy flight-lieutenant, doesn't answer immediately. He sucks on his pipe thoughtfully and murmurs: <Four missing. But it's early days. They may have landed at other airfields.'

<Bloody hell.' I hear Sgt Terence Gill, standing behind me, mutter: <Four! It's the bloody Wingco's fault. He let them know we were coming by climbing too soon.'

It had been an untidy, chaotic mess. It always is. Two aircraft may have collided. But no one is sure. No one is sure of anything. I saw Bud at the briefing. He was standing aloofly behind a group of pilots and navigators waiting to give their story to the Intelligence Officer. It's usually the navigators' reports which are the most informative, because they see the immediate aftermath of the strike as we turn for home. Some may have taken photographs.

I asked Bud, with the patronising air of an older schoolboy talking to a first-former: <How did it go?'

<All right,' he says dismissively, offering me a Woodbine. He has taken to smoking small, cheap cigarettes, in the belief that their poor quality will help him chuck the habit. I decline. He frowns and says, taking a sharp intake of breath, <They knocked off my port wingtip. Lousy bastards were aiming straight at my balls.'

<I know the feeling.'

Only after all accounts of the strike have been collated with photographs, will a clear picture of what happened be drawn up. But it has been a bad day. Terence Gill is mutinous because a cousin of his is among those missing. Three of the four crews missing are from our squadron. Usually, it is the squadron detailed to carry torpedoes which suffers the most casualties. But not today. The torpedoes, anyway, appear to have missed they were dropped too soon.

The BBC evening bulletin will say: <During a strike off Heligoland by Coastal Command Beaufighters four enemy warships were badly damaged. One is believed to have sunk. Four of our aircraft are missing.'

After the briefing I go back to my room. My roommate, Joseph Kolski, is among those who haven't returned. He is a Pole who declined to join a Polish squadron. This room of mine is full of ghosts, including that of Ron Howard, who landed in the sea last week just off Spurn Head and was rescued by fishermen. I can still see him as he came into the room we shared, grinning broadly. He was wearing a white Aran sweater, Wellington boots and carrying a half bottle of Scotch all provided by the crew of the trawler which had picked him up. We celebrated his escape from death, but two days later he failed to return from a Night Rover off the Dutch coast.

I put on my cleanest uniform. I'm hungry but there's no time to eat it's nine-thirty and I want to get down to the Barley Mow before closing time.

* * *

The Barley Mow, a thatched roof pub with low beams, is on the outskirts of North Camber village this side of the airfield. There is another, posher pub, the Fox and Hounds, on the other side of the village. Tonight, the sky is full of stars. There is a slight chill in the air. I get an erection just thinking about Babs as I walk briskly towards the pub. I walk faster and yet faster and try to think of other things. Bud is well liked; he exudes an air of tolerant good will towards everyone. I can't help envying him. Not just because he has a beautiful, talented and devoted wife who can poignantly express every human emotion with her body. But also because he is so damnably clever. He looked shaken, though, just now when I saw him waiting to be debriefed. I couldn't help thinking that all those high falutin religious notions of his must have vanished at the sight of death-dealing, multicoloured flak streaming up at him from all directions, But I don't think he is a phoney he genuinely believes all he says. But it's easy for him to be on the side of the angels when he has, apparently, a mother who dotes on him and a father who can afford to indulge his every whim.

On one occasion at his home in Albertstown, after drinking a few beers he had smuggled in, he asked me if I could remember what it was like to be a baby. I said: <No it's a complete blank'. (Oddly enough, though, I remembered as I spoke that I dreamed that I was a baby the other night. I was having an erection and my mother threw me across the room in disgust). <But you agree,' Bud said, standing up straight beside the big black stove, with a smile on his face, <that you and the baby that you once were are one and the same person.'

<Of course,' I replied.

<Okay. When you become an old decrepit man, is there still a link between you and the baby you once were?'

<Of course I shall still be me.'

<The link between you and the baby and the dying old man is the soul the immortal bit of you that never dies. We are like snow flakes, every one of which is unique. There can be nobody else in the whole of the universe who has experienced what it's like to be you. The soul cannot be replicated in any shape, manner or form. It is unique and must therefore exist through all space and time, in just the same way as an idea cannot be destroyed. It is impossible to destroy roundness or squareness or softness and it is impossible for the same reason to destroy a soul. '

<The mere fact that it is unique doesn't prove that it will survive my death. If I was brain dead, as I was before I grew a brain in my mother's womb, I shall be equally brain dead when my body ceases to live. It is memory which defines me. That single thread of memory constitutes Alex Colgate and when I die it will die also, leaving nothing behind.'

<Memory can exist without a body.'

<Rubbish. Kill my brain and you kill me along with any ridiculous notion it may have contained about going to Heaven.'

<Birds have memory of previous lives. They know how to make elaborate nests? How does a dog know how to hide a bone?'

<Instinct.'

<And how is it transmitted from one generation to the next?'

<Search me.'

<Through a memory unique to their species. We have a species memory which works in a similar way but is more developed, more individualised, because we are conscious of moving through time.'

<Okay. Then you tell me where my memory goes when I die.'

<When you stand by a river bank, each molecule of water flows down to the sea. Five minutes later the river is entirely different, because each individual separate molecule of water has already passed by. But each molecule still exists; it hasn't been annihilated. It has simply moved further down the river. To an observer from outer space the human race would similarly appear to be a river of beings passing through time, with no individuality at all. But we know we possess it. And just as each molecule of water continues its journey, so indeed do we, including that essential part of us, our memory.'

<Bud, I don't know whether you are a humbug or a fool to swallow all that nonsense.'

<And Alex Colgate, you're so full of prejudices that you can't see the obvious when it's staring you in the face.'

I said I was tired of the conversation I was quite convinced that Bud, because of his deep need for religion, was employing an argument which was totally riddled with inconsistencies.

He shrugged and said: <Okay, let's agree to disagree.'

Shortly afterwards, Bud asked Ruth to perform a dance for me. <Come on, baby. Show the man how nicely you dance.'

She shook her head.

<Honey, if you never dance, you'll forget everything you've ever learned.'

Reluctantly, Ruth got out of her chair and stood for a moment, looking a little puzzled. Then she performed a Dying Swan act right there in the middle of the room. The whole thing hardly took twenty seconds. But it was extremely moving. It spoke eloquently of accepting one's fate with dignity. It managed to convey the notion of eternity far more convincingly than Bud's arguments. When her hands had stopped wavering and closed as a shield around her body, she stood up and said briskly: <And now who's for ice cream?'

* * *

I am frightened when I go into action. I am also frightened of being frightened. The resultant chain reaction of sheer terror induces a terrible knot of fear in my stomach. As we approach the ships, I can see Heligoland, a low, fortified island, on our right. Heavy guns onshore are sending out menacing brown puffs which explode all around the formation as we approach our target. But the heavy flak is not as threatening as the so-called <light' flak from machine guns and cannons indicated by coloured tracers streaming out from the ships that are ahead and below us. We climb rapidly to a thousand feet, the six aircraft detailed to make a torpedo attack remaining at two hundred feet. Radio silence is broken, as I hear the Wingco's voice in my earphones calling: <Attack...attack...attack.'

<That's a nice blouse you're wearing,' I tell Babs, trying to win her favour.

<I'm not supposed to wear it with uniform. But I keep my coat collar up when I go out. It's real parachute silk.'

We are sitting in a barn. Babs is resting with her hands behind her head against a bale of straw; her silk-clad bosom appears intensely white in the moonlight streaming in through the open door.

I offer her a cigarette.

<No thanks. You're very addicted. Aren't you.'

<I'm even more addicted to you.'

<Oh, go on. You hardly know me.'

<I know one thing. I'd like to kiss you.'

<Well, what's stopping you?'

I study her face intently and say: <You're really very lovely.'

Her wide brow gives her a tranquil appearance. Her nose is small and neatly chiselled, her mouth generous.

She replies with evident satisfaction: <My Sunday school teacher once said I was the prettiest girl in the class...Well, go on, if you're going to kiss me.'

<Not just yet.' I light up my cigarette and inhale deeply. I am feeling queasy as a result of drinking three pints of beer in rapid succession in the pub. I had thought it would help to conquer my nervousness but it has unexpectedly taken away my desire.

Babs says: <Alex, I think I should know your full name before I kiss you.'

<Why?'

<So that someone could let me know if you went missing? I went out with a flight-engineer once, when I was at a Bomber station. He kept taking liberties. I was going to throw him over but in the end it didn't matter he went missing.'

<If I took liberties would you throw me over?'

<It would all depend.'

<Depend on what?'

<On whether you were serious about me.'

I stubbed out my cigarette. My queasiness having suddenly and miraculously disappeared.

<I'm very serious about you, Babs,' I said huskily and kissed her, placing my hand on her breast. Her ribbed brassiere felt like the beach defences at Hartington.

We kissed for a few seconds until she suddenly said: <Ooh, you shouldn't do that.'

<Do what?' I asked.

<Putting your hand there.'

<Could I, if I was serious about you?'

<Oh, yes. But I would have to be sure.'

<What would I have to do to make you sure?'

<You'd have to say you loved me.'

<But I do I do.'

<Say the words.'

<I have already said them.'

<No you haven't. Say ?I love you".'

<I love you.'

Babs rapidly unbuttoned her white blouse made of coveted parachute silk.

'Now...' she said, sighing deeply.

I kissed her once again and resumed my exploration of her WAAF regulation issue brassiere.

The kissing continued. She thrust her tongue in my mouth. We waggled tongues. I longed to explore under the massive, all-encompassing brassiere. But this was against the elaborate rules of courtship in which she believed so devoutly.

After a while, we pulled away from each other. Babs said breathlessly: <I wouldn't mind a cigarette.'

I lit two and gave her one. As the Swan Vesta match flared, she leaned forward. Her deep, deep cleavage moved me to exclaim: <Babs, you are really beautiful.'

Drawing on her cigarette, she said softly: <My mum says us girls are like the flowers in spring, soon fading in summer-time. A girl has to do the best for herself.'

<What's the best for you?'

<When we have been out together a couple of times we could get engaged.'

<Yes.'

My reply was intended to convey that what she had suggested was within the bounds of possibility; it wasn't intended to be a proposal of marriage. But Babs's said: <Alex, you are a lovely boy. Come here.'

Placing her cigarette carefully on a large stone, she gave me an enthusiastic kiss. She took up her cigarette again and said after a while: <What's it like?'

<What is what like?'

<What you did this afternoon. I saw you all go off.'

<I don't want to talk about it.'

* * *

Denis had said as the ships came in to view: <Take that one on the left.'

I slipped the hinged gunsight into my line of vision and checked the position of the safety-catch. Dirty brown puffs from the big guns on Heligoland were exploding all around us. But it was the endless stream of red, green yellow fireflies floating from the ships towards me that filled me with dread. Yellow for cowardice, I remember thinking as yellow tracer flashed past the windscreen. I pushed the nose down hard and concentrated on the grey warship down below. Shells from my cannon were making a trail of splashes towards the ship's side. This is it! Six-hundred feet... four hundred feet...The concentrated fury of anti-aircraft fire all around me dissolves my will. At three-hundred feet I swerve to the left of the ship. Passing by its bows, I make a steep turn to the right, twisting and turning through a hail of fire.

<Good man!' I hear Denis shouting excitedly from his position as I thrust on full power. <Get right down on the water and head for home.'

Struck dumb with terror, I am unable to reply. But I go down close to the welcoming sea and hug the waves, heading eastwards for home and safety.

About ten minutes later, I enquired: <Did you fire your pea-shooter.'

<Yes. And I took some pictures.'

<Did anybody go down?'

<I'm not sure. Everything seemed to be happening at once.'

<A complete shambles.'

<Yes,'

And so it proved to be.

* * *

I took the cigarette from Bab's mouth, carefully unpeeling it from her lips and extinguished it on the ground. Then I kissed her. Her assumption that I had proposed marriage had brought about a sea change in our relationship. Fumbling with her hands behind her, she unhooked her brassiere and laid it carefully on the straw. Filled with overpowering desire, I caressed her full breasts gratefully, tenderly and reverently.

Babs stretched herself out on the straw and reached out for me.

I bent down to kiss her. But the instant she sighed, her mouth slack with desire, my loins exploded, creating intense white spasms of ecstasy, followed by red, yellow then purple, concentric circles of gratification. But after the initial surge of affection and gratitude I felt towards the recumbent half-naked girl had faded I became conscious of being a complete failure at love-making.

I said <Oh, Babs, darling, I'm so sorry.'

Babs replied: <What are you sorry for?'

<For not doing it properly.'

<Oh, I wouldn't let you do it properly yet,' she replied with a tolerant smile. <That can wait until we're properly engaged to be married.'

The other two beds in my room are neatly made up. Their former occupants are missing. I am lying in bed smoking. I am due another week's leave soon, when I hope to attend my sister's wedding in London. Hitler has begun attacking London with noisy missiles the newspapers call <doodlebugs'. But calling them by a whimsical name doesn't make them any the less deadly. I hope one of them doesn't crash onto the wedding reception. Some of them are being shot down by our fighters and by anti-aircraft guns. But the majority are getting through, taking many lives and causing extensive damage.

I think again of Babs and become giddy with desire. I gulp cigarette smoke into my lungs to counter these powerful feelings. Wanting to know my full name so that she could be told if I was killed seemed a trifle tactless. But I suppose she was just being practical. She is rather naive and unsophisticated. But that doesn't stop me from having a tremendous desire for her. We have agreed to meet again on Thursday outside the camp gates.

Denis is getting married just before Christmas. It seems a long way away.

I don't understand this war. We could have put a stop to Hitler's advance if we had acted firmly during the Thirties. But he calculated correctly that there was no stomach for a fight in England or France. Reports are leaking out of Europe that the Nazis have started to kill Jews in the territory they control. Bud's theory is that Jews are hated because we dare to acknowledge the unpalatable truth that unchecked human nature is cruel and needs powerful, inflexible rules to keep it in check. He says the only way of avoiding future wars and all their attendant miseries is for the whole world to accept the Ten Commandments and the basic laws of Torah. At the moment I don't want to be reminded about such laws because they might prevent me from seducing Babs!

Aren't I entitled to have sexual intercourse before I die?

There's no right to anything. It was dishonest of you to allow her to believe that you had honest intentions.

I do think about marrying her.

Balls! you just want to fuck her.

All right. I'll marry her. I'll marry anyone who'll let me have proper sex.

You're not behaving like a responsible Jew.

I no longer regard myself as a Jew. Any religious beliefs I once had have long since evaporated. Not that this would help me if I were captured by the Nazis they kill full Jews, half Jews and quarter Jews without compunction. I am simply making the point that I can no longer live in accordance with the impossibly high ideals drummed into me when I was a child especially those relating to sex. I badly need a woman. The only other women I have ever met whom I would wish to marry are either already married or spoken for.

What happened to those high ideals of your youth?

I don't know...

I grab another cigarette, light up, draw on it greedily and remember that the other day the squadron adjutant asked me to pack up the belongings of Sgt. Damien Ryecroft, who lived briefly in this room, for return to his next of kin. I went through them systematically. Which was just as well, because I found a pack of post-cards with pictures of naked women. I am sure he would not have liked his parents to know about his secret vice. Sad to think that his experience of sex was so limited and limiting. He was a pleasant, chirpy sort of fellow, always smiling. I didn't get to know him very well. One doesn't get to know anyone very well. The only real friends I have made since I have been in the service are Ruth and Bud Fischer and Babs.

Can I regard Babs as a friend when all she thinks about is marriage? Of course, one has to see it from her point of view. She would not be the first one to be made pregnant by a member of aircrew who thoughtlessly goes for a Burton.

Perhaps I should ask Bud's opinion about whether I should marry her. He's married and very clever. Unfortunately, his judgement is clouded because of his morbid obsession with religion. I was telling him once how I nearly failed one of the tests for becoming a pilot because I couldn't stand on one leg for a minute. He replied: <You should have recited the famous saying of the Jewish sage, Hillel.' And seeing my puzzled look, went on: <Hillel said the whole of the Jewish religious creed could be stated while standing on one leg?'

Ruth intervened: <What on earth has that got to do with it?' She turned to me and said apologetically: <Bud can't help it. he's completely fixated on religion.'

<Don't you want to know what he said?' Bud enquired, pretending to look hurt.

I replied: <Whether I want to or not, I know you'll insist on telling me.'

Ruth laughed gaily and said: <Alex has really got you summed up, Bud. Why don't you promise to refrain from sermonising until you become a qualified rabbi.'

While Bud and I were having a beer in the Sergeant's mess, I casually mentioned I was dating Babs from the transport section.

<Wow! That good-looking blond dame a bit like Betty Grable. She drove me out to the aircraft the other day.

<I'm thinking of marrying her,' I said.

<So?'

Piqued by his lack of interest, I continued: <I thought you might like to comment.'

<Buddy-boy, you tell me why I should comment on someone else's choice? I didn't ask anyone's opinion before I married Ruth.'

<You didn't need to. She's perfect!' I went on rapidly: <Unfortunately, Babs wouldn't fit in with my family. She's not Jewish for one thing.'

<You are always claiming that you're not Jewish.'

<Well, yes, but apart from that she is, how shall I say, unsophisticated.'

<If that's important to you, don't marry her.'

<I have a tremendous physical desire for her.'

<You mean you want to shag her not marry her.'

<That's putting it crudely. But yes, I suppose it's true.'

<Well, my advice is: if you do, use a French letter.'

Bud gave me a knowing, rascally smile. But I thought, or rather hoped, he might take an interest in my predicament.

<She said she won't have intercourse with me until we are engaged to be married.'

Bud looking amused, said with a judicious air: <For someone who is an avowed agnostic, this should be easy. You can now seduce her by promising to marry her.'

<Oh, come off it. I'm not that much of a shit.'

<You're not very consistent, are you Buddy-boy. I suspect that you are ruled much more by inhibitions than by principles.'

I winced and looking around to see that no one was in earshot, said: <Actually, something terrible happened. We were snogging passionately and...'

<And what?'

I told him.

Bud said sympathetically: <It can easily happen when you're inexperienced and have an excessive build up of spunk. Don't fret about it. You'll get your end away some day and from then on you'll be fine.'

<But when?' I said in a melancholy tone.

Bud shook his head in mock sorrow and said: <It doesn't seem fair, does it. You're prepared to give up your life for women in general but a woman won't give up her virginity for you. That's the way the world is, Alex. You'll just have to sort it out yourself.'

<Should I marry her?'

<There's no reason why you shouldn't. People of different backgrounds can get married and live a happy life, if they make up their minds to do so. It's happening all the time... But it's easier, if they do have a lot in common, of course.'

He suddenly looked up at the large wooden shield on the Mess wall emblazoned with the Royal Air Force Coat of Arms and said, smiling: <With you instead of Per Ardua Ad Astra, I think it's a case of Per Barbara Ad Astra.'

I smiled. His version Through Barbara To The Stars accurately reflected my feelings. I was totally infatuated with her. But I was, as Bud had suggested, shy, inhibited and almost totally ignorant of the art of courtship. Babs only seemed more experienced than I was regarding sex. I vaguely perceived that we were both swimming in uncharted waters. The point she had made that it wouldn't be fair if I made her pregnant and then disappeared into the North Sea was perfectly valid.

Rumour had it that contraceptives were available from the station Medical Officer. But I knew from personal experience that the medical profession were not at all helpful in giving advice on anything to do with sex. It was rumoured that French letters were available in some chemists' or barbers' shops. But I had been brought up to believe that contraceptives were obscene. The idea of mentioning them to a shop assistant seemed appalling. I was prepared to face that particular challenge but it might be weeks before I went into the nearest town.

Recently, a navigator on the station, finding out that he had made his girl friend pregnant and in a state of confusion and madness, had shot her dead with a revolver stolen from the Guard Room. He had given himself up to the police afterwards. Marrying someone, even if she was from a different background, seemed a much better idea.

The next day I flew up the coast towards a beached and abandoned destroyer we use for target practice. Ciné cameras in the aircraft wings record our results. A flock of seagulls hovering over the rusted hull dispersed frantically as I fired my guns, causing a line of puffy explosions to run towards the rusty hull. Denis fired his aft-mounted Browning gun after we had passed over the wreck. I made half a dozen runs, flew back to base and landed at about lunch time.

Bud Fischer was in the Sergeants' Mess, sitting alone at a table. Susan, the waitress who had recently lost her boy friend, came up to our table with a bowl of potato soup. Bud asked sympathetically: <How are you coping, Suzie?' Her face brightened. She told us that she had received a wonderful letter from her missing boy friend's parents offering consolation on her loss. When she had gone, Bud said gravely: <Who was it said Cambridge undergraduates don't marry waitresses? Your famous class system is breaking down under the stress of war.'

<That's probably the exception that proves the rule.'

<Have you decided what to do about Babs?'

<I have a date with her on Thursday. I still haven't made up my mind.'

<Ruth thought it might help if you discussed it with us some time. Old married folk like us like to help the younger generation,' Bud then added, with an encouraging smile. <Come and have dinner with us when we have some free time. We can get to the airfield in less than two minutes on my motorbike, if we get scrambled.'

I accepted the invitation.

I looked forward to seeing Ruth again but couldn't see how she and Bud could possibly help me. Marriage, always a gamble, would in the case of Babs and myself be even more so because of our vastly different backgrounds. Nor, as far as I could see, would I be in a position to support a wife and family when the war ended.

Bud had been totally unsympathetic when I told him that before the war I had been turned down for employment because I was Jewish. He had said: <It's good for your character it makes you try harder, which is what life is all about.' Knowing the advantages he had enjoyed, I thought this was a bit rich but had been too polite to say so. Instead, I had replied: <Since I don't believe in Judaism. why should I be punished as if I did?'

He replied: <Judaism is more about doing than believing. There are millions of sceptical Jews in German concentration camps. You should thank the God you don't believe in you're not one of them.'

I like and admire Bud Fischer but find him infuriating at times. He is far better educated than I am. But I don't have to accept uncritically everything he says. He quoted some Greek philosopher once who apparently argued that since certain abstract notions such as that of absolute equality pre-exist in the mind before birth, there must be a soul which survives temporal life. I wasn't able to refute his argument at the time but I'm sure that I shall be able to one day when I have read as many books as he has. The notion he put forward sounds just as fallacious as his suggestion that in some weird kind of way we exist in the mind of a cartoonist. The Cartoonist in question has made a grotesque mess of Creation, including Adam and Eve and the whole of their issue. Those ridiculous biblical myths have long since been blown away by Science. It is incredible that such a clever chap should still be able to believe.

I have been writing down what I should say to Babs. I appear to be suffering from some kind of stomach bug I haven't eaten since yesterday. It's probably through smoking too much.

Darling Babs, I want you to know that I do love you dearly. But one has to act in a responsible way. When the war started I was unemployed. I shall be in a similar situation when it ends. For that reason I think we should call the whole thing off.

I pick up my fountain pen and start again.

Dear Babs I am going to be brutally honest with you. When I said the other night that I was in love with you, it was really just an excuse to seduce you. I dare say if I had had more experience I would have succeeded. I think it would be best if we did not see each other again. You are a wonderful girl and I'm sure you will soon find someone more worthy of you than I can ever hope to be.

It still doesn't sound right.

I try again: Darling, you are the sweetest, dearest girl I have ever met. Also the most desirable. I think of you day and night. But we shouldn't rush into things. I suggest we don't see each other for three weeks. At the end of that time, if we still feel the way we feel now, we'll get en-gaged...Have a port and lemon.

The last approach seemed the best. Nevertheless, the thought of not seeing her again was extremely painful. Vivid images of her half-naked body lying in the straw kept coming into my mind, giving me an erection. I sat and shivered in a bath of cold water for a while, which solved the problem temporarily. But as soon as I added hot water it promptly returned.

An urgent call to duty from the siren was more successful in driving sex out of my mind. I hastily towelled myself and arrived, still partially damp, in the briefing room. Denis was already there among a group of aircrew. We were told by the Briefing Officer that we would be attacking a small target that warranted only one squadron of aircraft.

As we boarded the crew transport, Denis commented sourly: <It doesn't seem a good idea to me to go out with such a small number. They'll pick us off one by one.'

I replied: <It obviously doesn't need the whole Wing.'

I went through the cockpit checks.

Soon, we were airborne.

It started to drizzle. I switched on the windscreen wipers. The cloud base began to come down. We descended to five-hundred feet, then three-hundred feet, occasionally whipping through grey scud hanging from the cloud base, which obscured our vision and made flying in close formation very difficult. I hoped that adverse weather would force Squadron-Leader Robbie Brown to call off the operation altogether so that I could keep my date with Babs.

An hour went by. The weather deteriorated further. Our propellers were almost touching the white-capped waves. The formation seemed in danger of breaking up. Denis's concern seemed well founded: if we were forced to attack the enemy ships singly, they would have a field day, picking us off one by one.

Soon, however, the weather improved and we climbed to a thousand feet. A few faint dots appeared ahead and as we drew nearer I could see five ships below in a calm grey sea. A note of desperation sounded in Robbie Brown's voice, as he called: <Attack! Attack! Attack!'

Two merchant vessels accompanied by three armed trawlers put up an intense barrage as we dived on them. Denis was shouting something on the intercom. I concentrated on one of the merchant ships, which was spraying a dangerous stream of coloured tracer all around me. The bullets floated in slow motion past the cockpit like lazy butterflies. Intense bursts of fire were issuing from the armed trawlers. As I pressed the firing button on the control column, I caught a glimpse of a Beaufighter hurtling into the water, making a huge splash. There was the sound of pebbles clattering against a sheet of galvanised iron, followed by an anguished cry over the intercom. Busily engaged in weaving and twisting to avoid the flak, I narrowly missed another aircraft. As soon as I had passed over the ships, I dived towards the sea. Glancing back, I could see two vessels on fire.

I was immensely relieved to find the aircraft responding to the controls and called out on the intercom to Denis: <Poet and Toothpaste have survived to fight another day.'

There was no answer.

<Are you all right?'

Again no answer.

I could do nothing but head for home. A little later, a weak voice said: <Steer 305. We're drifting south.'

<Are you all right.'

<I'm NOT fucking all right. I'm holding a bloody great bandage from the emergency pack over my right eye. It hurts like hell. But I've got a Gee fix. You're heading for Ameland at the moment and we'll be in all sorts of trouble.'

I turned thirty degrees to the right.

<Are you losing much blood? The weather is all right at base. I'm piling on the power to get home sooner.'

<I'm okay apart from the fact that I can't see out of my right eye.'

<The important thing is you still have the essential equipment for your wedding.'

Denis made a brave attempt to laugh.

'Yeah. I think that part of me is all right...It's very painful. Do you think I should use morphia from the First Aid box?'

<Not unless you have to. Keep us on track. We'll call for an ambulance when we land. The weather's all right.'

But the cloud base was low at North Camber and I had to make two attempts to land. Denis was wheeled off in an ambulance.

By the time I had been debriefed, it was too late to meet Babs. Dejectedly, I asked another WAAF to tell her that I would meet her at the same place on Saturday night.

We had lost two aircraft. Pieces of perspex from the canopy, hit by a cannon shell, had punctured Denis's eye. There was a jagged hole in the tailplane.

When I called in at Sick Quarters to visit Denis he was asleep, having been given a sedative. I still couldn't make up my mind what I should say to Babs when I saw her.

I have been writing down what I should say to Babs. I appear to be suffering from some kind of stomach bug I haven't eaten since yesterday. It's probably through smoking too much.

I pick up my fountain pen and start again.

It still doesn't sound right.

As we boarded the crew transport, Denis commented sourly: <It doesn't seem a good idea to me to go out with such a small number. They'll pick us off one by one.'

I replied: <It obviously doesn't need the whole Wing.'

I went through the cockpit checks.

Soon, we were airborne.

I was immensely relieved to find the aircraft responding to the controls and called out on the intercom to Denis: <Poet and Toothpaste have survived to fight another day.'

There was no answer.

<Are you all right?'

Again no answer.

I could do nothing but head for home. A little later, a weak voice said: <Steer 305. We're drifting south.'

<Are you all right.'

I turned thirty degrees to the right.

<Are you losing much blood? The weather is all right at base. I'm piling on the power to get home sooner.'

<I'm okay apart from the fact that I can't see out of my right eye.'

<The important thing is you still have the essential equipment for your wedding.'

Denis made a brave attempt to laugh.

'Yeah. I think that part of me is all right...It's very painful. Do you think I should use morphia from the First Aid box?'

<Not unless you have to. Keep us on track. We'll call for an ambulance when we land. The weather's all right.'

But the cloud base was low at North Camber and I had to make two attempts to land. Denis was wheeled off in an ambulance.

By the time I had been debriefed, it was too late to meet Babs. Dejectedly, I asked another WAAF to tell her that I would meet her at the same place on Saturday night.

We had lost two aircraft. Pieces of perspex from the canopy, hit by a cannon shell, had punctured Denis's eye. There was a jagged hole in the tailplane.

When I called in at Sick Quarters to visit Denis he was asleep, having been given a sedative. I still couldn't make up my mind what I should say to Babs when I saw her.

Denis was sitting up in bed when I visited him in Sick Quarters the following morning. A large white pad covered his right eye. Moonlight Becomes You, sung by Bing Crosby, was issuing from a radio on his bedside cabinet. He switched it off, when he saw me. I asked him how he felt. He replied: < The Doc thinks my vision will be okay. I've been thinking that it was just as well I got it in the eye and not you, otherwise we'd have both gone down into the drink.'

<Have you informed Dianne?' I enquired.

<Not yet... She probably won't want to marry me if I<m scarred for life.'

<Don't worry. Nelson's wounds didn't put Lady Hamilton off.'

Denis smiled. <That's a coincidence! I've just written a poem about him.' He handed me a sheet of paper. On it was written in his neat handwriting:

<I've lost my arm, I've lost my eye.

But there is no dilemma,

The part of me we both love best

Doth still belong to Emma.

I still excel at gunnery,

My cannon still will fire

And hit that dear sweet target,

The one I most desire.'

<That's very good,' I said admiringly. <You are a poet after all.'

<It's only doggerel I used to write proper poetry.'

<Why don't you write some while you're in here.'

<I've got an idea for a poem about North Camber. I'm thinking of calling it <The Bloodless Abattoir.'

Momentarily puzzled, I quickly saw what he meant. There was rarely blood to be seen. Our friends and comrades simply disappeared into the sea. I had a sudden insight into the stoical courage he and his fellow navigators displayed. Totally dependent on the skill of the pilot a few feet ahead of him, a navigator spends his time in his tiny cubby hole Dead Reckoning the aircraft's position on Mercator maps, using a protractor and a pair of compasses. In combat he can do little but point his camera or fire an almost useless Browning machine gun and hope his pilot successfully dodges the flak.

There were no missions that day or the next. The adjutant informed me that I would be teamed up with Flying Officer Frank Couts when he returned from leave.

* * *

Babs greeted me with an affectionate smile when we met outside the guard house. She told me that one of the sentries had given her a wolf whistle while she was waiting for me.

<I don't blame him, you're the prettiest thing around for miles.' I remarked enthusiastically. Even the bulky uniform couldn't disguise her sensuous, well-rounded frame. She seemed so delightfully frank and wholesome that all thoughts of ending our relationship went out of my head.

It began to rain as we trudged towards the village. I pulled up the collar of her greatcoat and then my own.

<How did you get on the other night? ' she asked.

<My navigator was hit in the eye. But he'll be okay they reckon he'll get his sight back.'

<Oh, Alex. I'm so glad. And I'm glad you got back safely.'

We tramped on for a while. She said suddenly: <A friend of mine I met at the last station I was on has just got engaged to an air-gunner.'

<Bully for them. How are your parents?'

<I lost my dad a long time ago. My mum runs the village store.'

<I bet you eat well when you're at home.'

<Not really. Mum looks after her customers she's rather mean with us.'

We were passing the barn. Babs pointed to it and said: <I hope it doesn't let in the rain.'

<You're worried about the farmer's hay?'

She laughed and said playfully: <You do like a joke, don't you. I meant I hoped we wouldn't get wet.'

She tugged me towards it.

I said: <Let's have a drink first.'

<All right then.'

We plodded on towards the village. In the crowded lounge bar of the Barley Mow I ordered a glass of port and lemon and a pint of mild and bitter. An RAF corporal and his WAAF girl friend moved off a wooden bench. Babs and I took their places by an empty fireplace. Babs pointed out a poster on the wall, which warned Careless Talk Costs Lives.

<Do you believe the Germans have spies over here?'

<Hundreds,' I replied solemnly. <Including female ones. You could be a Mata Hari wearing WAAF uniform.'

<Who's Mata Hari?'

<She was a famous Dutch lady dancer who spied for the Germans during the First World War. She used her beautiful body to obtain military secrets.'

Babs enquired archly: <Do you think my body is beautiful enough to do that?'

<It certainly is!' I replied ardently. Her question had evoked vivid images in my mind. I reminded myself sternly that I must banish such thoughts.

I went to the bar. A fierce altercation was going on behind me as I waited to be served. Terry Gill and another sergeant pilot who had recently joined the squadron were angrily discussing the previous day's operation.

<It was bloody criminal,' Terry Gill was saying. <If the whole Wing had gone out, we'd have sunk the lot without casualties. My cousin went for a Burton needlessly. We enlisted together. I'll shoot down the Wingco the next time we go out,' he added savagely.

I turned round, tapped him on the shoulder and placed a warning finger on my lips.

Babs enquired, as she held out her hand for the port and lemon, <What was the matter with that pilot you spoke to?'

<He was sounding off about losing his cousin.'

<Did we lose many?...Ooh! I mustn't ask, may I?' Looking very solemn. She added: <And I hope they never get you. I'd be heartbroken if you were killed'

<There are plenty more fish in the sea.'

Bab's eyes suddenly filled with tears.

<I was only joking,' I protested. <Only the good die young and I'm an absolute bastard.'

<No you're not,' Babs said, snivelling into a handkerchief. <You're twice as nice as anyone else I have ever met.'

<Come on,' I said uncomfortably. <We're supposed to be having a good time. Drink up there's a good girl.'

She said coquettishly: <I bet you're trying to get me stoshers so you can seduce me.'

<I've no such intention. Didn't I refuse to go in the barn on the way here.'

<Only because you wanted to get me blotto first.'

<I wouldn't take advantage of you.'

<Even if I was sober?'

<I might be tempted in that case,' I admitted

She admonished me gently: <You men want only one thing. And the trouble is you always want to have a clear conscience as well.'

<Surely, it's okay for two willing partners to make love.'

<What about the sanctity of marriage?' Babs asked, inclining her head questioningly.

<Time enough to get married, if there's a baby on the way,' I replied airily.

<And what if Daddy gets killed in the meantime?'

Upset by what seemed to me an unfair response, I said gruffly: <Come on. This conversation is getting far too serious. Let's have another drink.'

I went to the bar and patted a large sheepdog on the head as I waited my turn to be served. The dog's owner, a large, bluff-faced man in check tweeds, offered to buy me a drink. I declined.

Sgt Gill and his companion had gone. Some local farm workers had just arrived and were expertly aiming darts at the dartboard.

There was a pensive expression on Bab's face when I returned. Suddenly, I saw myself as a Victorian cad with evil intentions. Making up my mind to do the decent thing, I said firmly: <Come on, drink up. I'm going to take you back to base.'

Babs looked at her wristwatch and complained: <It's only half-past nine.'

<I think we should go.'

<But I'm enjoying myself.'

<Let's have an early night.'

I drank the rest of my beer and stood up. As we left the pub, Babs snuggled up to me and said enticingly: <I know why you were in such a hurry to leave'.

<It's not what you think,' I said, increasing my pace, and launched into the clumsy explanation I had prepared, explaining why I couldn't offer marriage. I told her earnestly that I was Jewish and that our backgrounds were vastly dissimilar. I added almost venomously: <You could search the whole wide world to find a more unsuitable couple than us.'

Babs replied: <I don't care a jot about your religion. And I think we're as suited as most people. Incidentally, I'm very upset about your navigator it could so easily have been you,'

<It's not serious. He'll be all right.'

Some swallows were swooping erratically around the barn in the dying light. It had stopped raining.

Babs said: <Come on,' and pulled me towards the open door.

Tempted beyond endurance, I said bitterly: <I can't marry you. Not for a long while. Probably not ever.'

<I don't give a damn. Can't you forget all about that silly stuff.'

A thunderous roar of aircraft began overhead as Bomber Command started their nightly journey towards the industrial heartland of Germany. The noise was deafening for the next ten minutes. We sat in the barn and smoked. When the noise subsided, by mutual agreement we stubbed our cigarettes into the ground.

In the fading light, Babs slowly disrobed and when she was totally naked came and huddled up against me. This was the moment I had looked forward to for years. A beautiful girl was asking me to make love to her. And to my utter dismay I found myself completely unable to respond. Smething inside me my will, my courage, my spirit had collapsed into nothing.

<What is it?' Babs asked timorously. <Don't you like me?'

<Babs,' I whispered, <you're the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. You're too good for me. You're more generous than I deserve. There's something wrong with me!'

<What is it?' Babs cried out in real distress, clinging desperately to me.

<I don't know!... It must be the bloody war.'

I broke down and cried.

Some types of aircraft, because of their poor flying characteristics, have been dubbed Flying Coffins. Here, in the Sick Bay I feel as though I am already in a coffin. Officially I am still alive. But this is just a bureaucratic device to keep me on the establishment. Deep inside me I just know that I am dead. I think it may be a form of cancer. Either fear has given me cancer, or else cancer has given me a fear so great that it is destroying my body cells one by one, which amounts to the same thing. Whatever it is is steadily gnawing its way inside me When I told the medical officer yesterday that I had not eaten for several days, he gave me a cursory physical examination and ordered me into the Sick Bay for observation. I am the only one here.

I haven't been told what's wrong with me. But it must be something pretty serious. I have absolutely no appetite for food and the overwhelming desire I formerly felt for women has completely ebbed away. A pretty nurse brings me medicine several times a day not that it does the slightest bit of good. Her beguiling smile has no effect on me whatsoever.

Babs probably thinks I have gone missing. Which is just as well. I'd be no use to her or anybody. There is no point in telling my parents that I am dying. If by the time of my sister's wedding next month I am dead, it won't make the slightest bit of difference. The guests will tactfully refrain from mentioning me. People, after all, are dying in great numbers all the time, including quite a few from the ?Buzz bombs" (or <Doodlebugs') which are presently raining down on London.

I wanted to tell Babs how I had changed my mind about her, when I discovered that she was much more genuine, honest and kind than I had at first realised. She had, after all, spontaneously thrown aside her aspirations of marriage in favour of just loving me. And I, poor fool, had been too weak to take the proffered gift. But it's too late now.

From the bookshelves in the Sick Bay (courtesy of the Women's Voluntary Services) I have selected a play by J. B. Priestley called I Have Been Here Before. The print was at first a meaningless blurr but I tried hard to concentrate and gradually it began to make sense. It offers a glimpse of alternate worlds in which all the different consequences of the decisions we take during our lives can be played out the implication being, I suppose, that we may eventually choose our own happy ending. Quite daft, of course. My relationship with Babs can never be mended after that ignominious episode in the barn. I'm a complete failure. If I sank the whole damned German navy, I would still account myself a failure.

A nurse asks me if I could manage to eat something. I shake my head and mumble: <Nothing thanks just a glass of water.' <Won't you try something light perhaps a sandwich?' I shake my head. The very thought of food makes me feel nauseous. She gives me a sultry smile and withdraws. But her smile has no effect. I am devoid of appetite, sexual or otherwise. I keep seeing whitened bones on the sandy sea bed. I don't know why that particular image should come into my mind. It must, after all, be very peaceful down there away from all the noise and confusion. You don't have to worry about your sexual prowess at the bottom of the sea.

I drifted off to sleep a moment ago and saw Babs drowning, pale, spectral, her golden hair spread out against green sea water laced with foam. A distant voice broke into my dream, saying: <There's a visitor for you.'

My eyes took in a Flight-Sergeant's uniform. Bud Fischer was standing by the bed. He said: <I heard you were in here, so I thought I'd pop in on my way home.'

<That's good of you. How's Ruth?'

<Just surviving. She can't stand rural life. I've promised her a week in London when I get my next leave.'

<Remember me to her.'

<You're coming to dinner one evening when you get out of here. What's wrong with you, Buddy-boy?'

<I can't eat. I think it's cancer.'

Bud gave a sceptical grimace.

I asked: <Has anything happened in the last couple of days?'

<We knocked off two mine-sweepers off Texel. Some of our guys got carried away and shot up the life-rafts.'

I said: <What on earth for?'

Bud stroked his chin and said regretfully: <Who knows. People lose relatives in bombing raids. They get full of hate about it and want to take it out on the enemy. I remonstrated with one guy when we got home and he said: ?What are you talking about! The bastards were trying to murder us only a couple of minutes before!" Bud shrugged and added: <Human nature really shows up in war-time.'

I said dully: <When you feel like I do, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. It makes no difference. We're all going to die sooner or later.'

<Better later than sooner.'

<What makes you say that?'

<We're put here on this earth to live life to the full.'

<It's all right for you with a beautiful wife and a great future. I don't have much to look forward. Anyway, I'm dying from cancer.'

<Did the M.O. says it's cancer.'

<They never tell you the truth.'

<If they thought you had cancer they'd have you in a proper hospital in double-quick time.'

I digested this information for a while and then said: <Well, whatever it is is killing me just the same. I can't eat a thing.'

Bud pulled over a chair from a corner of the room, sat down and whispered: <Has the flying got to you?'

I replied indignantly. <Bloody hell! Of course not. I'll be back as soon as I can eat. That is, if it's not cancer.'

<How's it going with what's-her-name...Babs?'

<She's okay, I suppose.'

<Are you keen on her?'

<She's not a bad kid.'

<Did she put out eventually?'

I hadn't heard this trans-Atlantic expression before but its meaning was obvious.

I grimaced and whispered weakly: <She did but nothing happened.'

<Why not?'

<Because I couldn't do anything.'

Bud looked grave for a moment and then he suddenly laughed and said: <I know what's wrong with you. Mind if I smoke?'

<You're not supposed to in here.'

He lit up anyway and the distinctive smell of Woodbine floated towards me. Bud inhaled briskly and said: <I'll tell you what the trouble is you've got a terrible hang-up about sex.'

I said angrily <How the hell do you know?'

<Don't take offence. It's just a theory of mine. You told me your folks are very tight-assed.'

<I can sort myself out. I don't need other people to do it for me.'

<Of course you can and you will,' Bud said soothingly. <And you've proved you can attract women Babs is the nicest looker in the Transport section.' He added in a whisper: <But don't worry. Women can be infinitely forgiving. Have another go as soon as you can. You'll make it next time.'

<There won't be a next time. She's not the right girl for me. She's a country bumpkin. I need someone more sophisticated.'... I was thinking of Ruth.

<If she's prepared to put out she's exactly the right girl for you.'

<I'm not going to take advantage of her. It goes against my principles'

<If a girl makes a present of herself, you have an absolute duty to accept.'

Bud drew again on his cigarette and then stubbed it out on an ashtray. He gazed at me calmly and went on: <If you go on in this way, Buddy-boy, you'll be a candidate for the nuthouse.'

<I'm not mad I just think I have cancer. I haven't eaten a thing for days.'

<You just needed a rest that's all. You'll be okay in a few days.'

He was right. The following morning, the nurse brought me a boiled egg for breakfast. The smell was delicious. I devoured it hungrily and was discharged from Sick Quarters the next morning.

Frank Couts, my replacement navigator, wears the blue and white ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Cross. He is immensely tall. Just as we were about to clamber into the aircraft on our first flight together, he made clear his practical, down-to-earth attitude towards the job, saying: <I'll tell you where the worst flak is coming from. Ignore what I'm telling you at your peril! I believe in pounding the enemy with the least cost to ourselves.'

<My thoughts exactly, Frank. I shall heed every word you say.'

But I didn't. And nearly paid the price. A few days later, on an lone daytime sortie off the Dutch coast, I spotted a miniature submarine. We had not been equipped with depth charges, so I dived towards it, churning up the water around its conning tower with my cannon. The mini-sub rapidly submerged. I could hear, but almost fatally ignored, Frank's voice in the earphones, shouting urgently: <Pull out, man. For Christ's sake pull out!' In my fierce excitement I dived so steeply that when I finally pulled back on the stick, our momentum nearly carried us down into the sea.

I said on the way home: <I don't think we got the bastards, but by God, we gave them a fright.'

<You gave me a bad one, too,' Frank grumbled. <We nearly joined them in their bloody submarine.'

On arrival at North Camber, I asked one of the WAAF drivers to pass a message to Babs.

<Didn't you hear?' she asked.

<Hear what?'

<Her mother had a heart attack and she has been given a compassionate posting to Chivenor, so that she can be near her.'

I felt sad. I made up my mind to write to her but I haven't done so yet. I'm too embarrassed. I treated her badly and failed her in every possible way.

A welcome event occurred. The Group Captain sent for me. I ventured into his office, expecting a reprimand for some offence I had unwittingly committed. Instead, to my intense surprise, I was told that I had been recommended for a commission. Bud Fischer, too, I learned later that day, was also to receive a commission.

We went to London together, bought new uniforms and then attended a brief course at Hereford on our new duties and responsibilities. Bud made a remark while we were attending the course that made me fear for his sanity. We had just entered the officer's mess at Hereford for the first time and I was admiring the silver cups and trophies adorning the highly-polished mahogany tables and sideboards and the splendid oil paintings of Lord Trenchard and other famous air marshals, when Bud whispered solemnly: <We are now under an even greater obligation to give up our lives for the monarch.'

I replied crisply: <Don't give me that load of bullshit.'

He smiled, in order to make clear that he was just pulling my leg. But later, as we sipped sherry under the mistaken impression that it was an appropriate drink for the officers' mess, he mused seriously: <Talking of noblesse oblige, I have always considered that the historic role of we Jews is to take on a little extra responsibility.'

<Isn't that a bit arrogant?'

<Not really. God offers the job around to everyone who wants it. But it's not very popular because it brings with it a good deal of flak.'

<What about God's responsibility to those who take it on?' I replied acidly. No God worthy of his name would allow what is going on in Europe at the moment.'

<But you claim not to believe in God.'

<Damned right I don't. Only an idiot could believe in a God who chooses people to be his divine instrument and then allows them to be massacred.'

<It isn't God who chooses. We choose ourselves. Not many accept the commission. Our history shows that it is only a tattered remnant in every generation who hang on in there.'

<Who can blame anybody for wanting to opt out of all that superstitious nonsense.'

Bud's eyes turned towards the painting on the wall from which the stern visage of Air Chief Marshal Lord Trenchard gazed at us. I wondered for a brief moment if his disordered mind was making him identify the founder of the Royal Air Force with the Big Boss in the Sky. He thought for a while and said dreamily: <No one can be blamed. But those of us who stay on do so because we just know we have to.'

I said: <Get off your high horse, Bud and have another sherry.'

Just to annoy him, I deliberately ordered pork in the Mess that evening.

The following day was a Sunday. There were no lectures. I caught a bus to the nearby town of Cheltenham. Being saluted while strolling through the streets was a novel but not altogether unwelcome experience. I was aproaching a church, when a young Royal Air Force flying officer hurried up to me and said: <Excuse me, I'm getting married in two hours time. My best man, a pilot in Bomber Command, has just gone missing. If you're not doing anything else, would you mind taking his place. I know it's a fearful nerve.'

There was a reception in a nearby restaurant after the church wedding ceremony. Asked to make a speech, I stood up and waving the tankard of beer in my hand, said: <It was a real privilege to be chosen as Best Man. I can truly say that Flying Officer X has behaved like a real gentlemen during all the time I have known him, which' looking at my watch <is going on for nearly two hours. But that short time has been long enough for me to learn that he is an excellent chap, who will make his beautiful bride very happy.' Cheers all round.

Under the influence of alcohol, all the faces blended into one distorted image of leering jocularity. But I couldn't seem to get rid of the ghostly presence of the intended Best Man. He kept moving beside me wherever I went.

I told Bud later that evening that it had sent the same kind of shiver down my spine as I had experienced in the Sick Bay when reading Priestley's play, I Have Been Here Before.

Unable to resist showing off his superior erudition, Bud Fischer quoted with a smile some words the playwright had spoken recently in one of his broadcasts: ?If there is no invisible sphere, no great communion of mind, why do we seem to move through a haunted world?" Bud then added, his face suddenly becoming solemn, <So you see that what you felt isn't all that unusual.'

I was angry with myself for having shown my weakness. I responded: <Balls to that! Let's have another drink.'

Bud replied, with a slow, reluctant smile: <Okay. Why should I cast any more of my philosophical pearls before swine. I'll have a double scotch and soda.'

The initial impression of dignity and decorum one gains on entering the officers' mess at North Camber can be misleading. Frequently, after a few drinks, a spontaneous game of rugby breaks out with a cushion substituting for a ball. Settees and armchairs are overturned in the fierce battle for possession. Suddenly, the game stops and we all troop back to the bar to resume drinking. I haven't yet discovered what signals the start of the game, or ends it. Nor have I yet succeeded in capturing the <ball'.

Life or what passes for life goes on as usual.

It occurred to me the other day that I have at long last achieved my ambition of becoming an <aristocrat', as defined in the newspaper article that persuaded me to enlist in the Royal Air Force. But now I have been commissioned, there is still something missing I yearn for a medal like Frank Couts's. Incidentally, I heard someone suggest that the reason a medal is called a <gong' is because it resonates in the female mind like the great gong struck by Bombardier Billy Wells at the beginning of the J. Arthur Rank films. If it is true that it has such an aphrodisiac effect on women, having one on my uniform would enable me to dispense with my joke book!

I now have a personal batman who makes up my bed. He is embarrassingly subservient. I have to say I enjoy the privileges of commissioned rank. However, since one signs chits without money changing hands, it is very easy to run up a heavy monthly mess bill.

I haven't the faintest idea what I shall do for a living when the war is over. But it doesn't seem worth bothering about at the moment

Bud took me on his motorbike an ancient BSA 250 to see Ruth the other night. Their cottage, on the other side of North Camber near the church, is poorly-furnished. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living-room with faded cretonne curtains. The roof of the cottage, one of a terrace of four, is crook-backed with age and looks as though it might collapse at any moment. When I pointed this out to Bud as he slewed to a halt outside, he replied it didn't worry him because he only has a six months lease. He thought the cottage would last that long.

Ruth looked adorable. She was wearing a flimsy yellow blouse and black trousers <pants', as she calls them and looked a little plumper than when I had last seen her.

She embarrassed me by flinging her arms round my neck, calling out enthusiastically: <Congratulations, Alex. You look wonderful. You've made it as an officer!'

<Thanks.'

<Bud says it's great in the Officer's Mess.'

<Yes and the pay's better.'

<I'm sure your parents are very proud of you.'

<I guess so.'

I had written to my parents to tell them the glad news but had not so far received a reply. I guessed they were too busy planning my sister's wedding.

I asked Ruth what her journey across the Atlantic had been like.

<Pretty scary. I was sharing a tiny cabin with six other women. The sea was rough and I was sea sick. We had several alarms but thank God, we weren't sunk.' She looked at her husband and said with a smile: <It was worth it to be with Bud.'

Her fond expression filled me with envy.

She added after a pause: <I<m sorry to hear your girl friend was posted away from North Camber.'

<Bud told you about it then.'

<He said you had a girl friend, that's all.'

Bud intervened hastily, saying: <It looks as though we have made that long-awaited break-through in Normandy. The war will be over soon.'

<Are you going to finish your engineering course when you go home?' I asked.

Ruth and Bud looked at each other.

Bud replied: <It all depends. I did promise my father that I would get a working degree before studying for the rabbinate. I shall have to discuss it with him when I get home.'

<You're still keen to become a rabbi?'

<Of course!' He looked surprised at the question.

I said to Ruth: <He's an amazing guy. The war has made me atheistic but it seems to have had the opposite effect on Bud.'

Bud said with a grin: <The Americans say there weren't any atheists taking cover in the foxholes at Bataan'

<Well, there's one sitting right here,' I replied.

Ruth commented, smiling: <Hungry atheists have to be fed as well as hungry believers. But I'm afraid it's only dried-egg omelettes and chips.'

<That will be grand,' I said. I'll go into the Fox and Hounds and see if there is a bottle of wine left in the cellar.'

At considerable expense I managed to obtain a bottle of pre-war French Beaujolais. When we were sitting around the small Victorian gate-legged table in the living-room of the cottage, I proposed a toast to <the Canadians who have braved hell and high water to come to Britain's aid.'

Bud said: <How could we possibly have stayed out. If ever there was a just war it is this one.'

I said mischievously: <What about the Finns coming into the war on the side of the Germans because they were under attack by our allies, the Russians.'

<That doesn't alter the fact that we're fighting a doctrine which is basically evil.'

<What about Communism?'

<Any kind of totalitarianism is bad. But communism is slightly redeemed because of its underlying idealism.'

I winked at Ruth to warn her that I was about to make a controversial statement and said: <Good and evil are purely subjective doctrines. There are no absolutes. What's good for one at some stage in history may be bad for someone else at another.'

<That's woolly thinking,' Bud said contemptuously. <What do you suppose we are fighting for?'

<Whatever it is has nothing to do with religion. There have been too many religious wars.'

<Only religion can supply the moral values that you are using to condemn war.'

<Atheists can be just as moral.'

Bud raised his eyebrows and replied gently: <Of course. But they are unconsciously drawing on the moral capital created by religion.'

I enjoyed debating in front of Ruth. I always felt that she was sympathetic to my side of the argument. But on this occasion, sensing that I was about to be cornered by a more skilful debater, I said: <Okay, let's talk about something else.'

Somewhat reluctantly, because he loved to argue, Bud agreed.

After placing bowls of gooseberry fool in front of us, Ruth switched on the radio. There was news of further Allied advances into France. A programme of records followed. As I listened to the beguiling voice of Frank Sinatra singing A lovely Way to Spend an Evening, I heard Ruth say quietly to Bud: <I think you should skip Harvard and attend rabbinical school as soon as we get back home.'

<I'm not sure, honey,' Bud said with slight irritation. <I'll have to discuss it with my father.'

Ruth said despairingly: <All these kinds of arrangements we made before the war are irrelevant now. We're getting older.'

<There's time, honey,' Bud said placatingly. <Let's get the war finished first.'

To distract them from their argument, I tried to amuse them with a humorous account of how I had nearly managed to turn my Beaufighter into a submersible while attacking a miniature submarine. Ruth listened wide-eyed.

She turned towards Bud and said earnestly : <Learn from Alex's experience. And don't do anything foolish.'

<I certainly won't, honey,' Bud said. <I love you too much.'

He went over and kissed Ruth on her lips. I smiled approvingly at this picture of domestic bliss, contriving to hide my feelings of envy.

Later, as we roared back to the airfield on Bud's motorbike, I could not help brooding on the fact that on his return he would be making love to Ruth while I lay awake in my lonely room.

Seen against the giant canvas of a world war, anti-shipping operations seem of relatively minor importance. We carried out an unsuccessful sweep off the coast of Norway the other day. I was grateful the Wingco didn't lead us into the fjords where we would have been cut to pieces by murderous cross-fire from both ship and shore. As it was we lost one aircraft to the long-range batteries. It was a five-hour flight. The piss-tube was blocked, and when, on the way home, I needed to use it, it blew back and wet my trousers.

I am hoping to get leave to coincide with my sister's wedding, which will be shortly taking place in London. After a service in the synagogue there will be a tea dance in a local hotel. It would be wonderful if while I was there I could meet a girl as bright, lovable and endearing as Ruth Fischer. But I don't suppose another such girl exists in the world. I actually succeeded in making Ruth laugh the other night with a funny story out of my joke book. I have to admit that she and Bud have been very good to me. But I sometimes wonder what is the basic flaw in Bud's character that makes him want to be a rabbi. If he ever achieves his ambition, he will certainly be very different from any of the rabbis I have known.

While he and I were having a drink together on the night we arrived back at North Camber from the officer training unit, I mentioned Mountleigh's affair with the wife of a merchant seaman on Andrew Island. I said: <It must be hard when husbands and wives are separated for such long periods.' Bud expressed his disapproval of their behaviour in the strongest terms. It made me wonder how I might have behaved if I had met Ruth in similar circumstances.

Even though I disagree with much of what he says, I can't help admiring him. I suppose I wouldn't banish religion entirely I agree with Bud's contention, although I would never dream of admitting it to him, that religion is necessary to keep people in order. It is the faint residue of religion left in me that deters me from making advances to his wife. Not that I would stand the slightest chance of making any headway. It's pretty obvious after that fiasco with Babs that I haven't a clue how to treat women. But leaving all that aside, what puzzles me is that such a highly intelligent fellow as Bud should believe in a Deity. Logic declares there is no future beyond the grave. Bud's anodyne words to the waitress who lost her boyfriend had a pathetic ring. Still, I suppose I shouldn't blame him for trying to comfort her.

Denis Coleridge has returned to duty. His eyesight is okay. His eyebrow is partially missing but the medics told him the scar would eventually fade. Dianne was <very kind to him' when he was on sick leave he told me I guessed that's a euphemism for going to bed. He congratulated me on being commissioned. I told him he soon would be. He replied it didn't worry him.

Bud was looking sorry for himself just before he went off on a Night Rover last night. I asked him what was the matter. He shrugged his massive shoulders and said that he had had an argument with Ruth. It emerged that Ruth is eager to have a child soon so that she can go back to dancing while she is still young.

I said hesitantly: <She's a great girl she's done everything possible for you including following you into a war zone.'

Scratching his mop of curly black hair, Bud said, frowning: <Perhaps you're right. Come to think of it a baby might be rather nice.'

I said: <Can you afford to become a daddy on a pilot officer's pay?'

Bud laughed.

<Money's not important.'

<It is when you're short of it.'

<Buddy-boy, it's all a question of attitude. Most millionaires are quite convinced they need more money when they can't possibly spend what they have already. I suppose I've been lucky coming from a comfortably-off family. But I shall be perfectly happy to live on a rabbi's pay.'

He then produced from his back pocket a copy of an ambiguous picture in black and white, which can be viewed as either two faces or a chalice. Flourishing the crumpled piece of paper, he said: <It is possible to change one's perception about almost anything and that is because we see everything through a lens of our own making. This little puzzle demonstrates that it is the mind that informs the eye, not the other way round. We always see what we want to see.'

He was very fond of his little <visual pun,' as he sometimes called it. But I replied rather ungraciously: <Forget it, Bud,' and wandered over to the bar.

The bad news came just as I was bending down to play a difficult shot at snooker. Frank Couts tapped me on the shoulder and said: <Bud Fischer went for a Burton last night.'

I placed my cue very deliberately into the rack and accompanied Frank to a corner of the room. My opponent started taking practise shots.

<What happened?' I asked.

<He didn't return from a Night Rover. Knowing he was a friend of yours, I thought I had better let you know.'

<Thanks.'

I immediately telephoned Ruth. She had already been informed that Bud was missing. The adjutant had tried to soften the blow by suggesting that he might have bailed out over enemy-controlled territory, or <ditched' in the sea. In the latter case there was a possibility that he and his navigator, Cosgrove, might be picked up by Air Sea Rescue.

Ruth sounded calm and resigned over the telephone. But I realised that she was putting on a brave front and was suffering intensely. I promised to call and see her. But as soon as I put down the telephone we were scrambled for a sweep off Heligoland.

As I placed my dinghy pack in the cockpit seat, I remembered how tiny and insignificant a dinghy looks in the vastness of the sea. I had once gone up in a Walrus seaplane looking for a similar K-type dinghy that had been deliberately dropped in a designated search area. The idea had been to train us to keep a weather eye open for aircrew who had come down in the sea. The dinghy I found during this training session it looked like a tiny dot in the vast ocean was the first sighting to have been made during a whole series of practise searches. It underlined the difficulty of finding <ditched' aircrew. However, the weather re-mained fair, which held out some hope, presuming that Bud and his navigator had made a successful ditching.

As I started the engines, I asked Denis over the inter-com: <Did you ever finish that poem, Denis?'

<Not yet. I may some day'

<Bud Fischer and his navigator, Bill Cosgrave, bought it last night.'

<Yes, I heard.'

The port engine coughed when I operated the magneto test-switches but the drop in engine revs was just within limits. Overhead, aircraft were gathering into formation. A few scraps of alto-stratus remained in a late afternoon sky, its blueness already beginning to fade.

As we taxied out, Denis said over the inter-com: <The vision in my right eye is a little blurred.'

<You were checked out by the medics,'

<I reckon I'll be okay.'

The aircraft in front became airborne. After a quick run through the take-off checks, I opened up the throttles. Soon, we were gathering in loose formation over North Camber. Shortly afterwards we headed off eastwards across the sea.

I was concerned about Denis's announcement. Plotting on a chart at night and interpreting the flickering green screen of the radar equipment puts a considerable strain on the eyes. I could only hope he would be able to do his job efficiently.

We flew on in calm air.

Hardened though I had become to death, I felt utterly miserable at losing Bud. He was obviously an exceptional being with qualities that I could never hope to emulate. His mind was constantly throwing up interesting, if at times baffling, ideas. He had a mystical side to his nature and yet he maintained a keen interest in the latest scientific advances. He was fond of pointing out that we live in a world in which dreams often seem to come true. I remembered him saying excitedly: <Aeroplanes just think of it Buddy-boy, aeroplanes! Fifty years ago they didn't exist. And now you and I fly them every day. And radar! Think of radar that can locate us more accurately than astro-navigation...'

He had once turned the tables on me by using the Theory of Evolution my own favourite weapon against his belief in Creationism by suggesting that our brains would eventually evolve to the extent that we would solve all outstanding mysteries, including the presently unfathomable one of our own mortality. The sheer audacity of this latter suggestion irritated me beyond measure..

I could see in my mind's eye, even as I gently manoeuvred my wing closer to the lead aircraft, the humorous curve of his lips, as he said: <Take that humble object the bubble. The phrase ?empty bubbles" inevitably connotes fanciful and empty illusions. And yet consider how miraculous it is that a bubble emerges from a flat surface of film to form an iridescent sphere. There are mathematical formulae which describe the shapes which, in turn, can be blown from a three-dimensional bubble and from a four-dimensional bubble and so on, a process which can go on ad infinitem. God is continually blowing bubbles, forming a succession of unimaginably beautiful worlds that we poor mortals can only vaguely conceive of as Heaven.'

It was next to impossible to defeat him in an argument. He had told me once that at Harvard his renowned debating skills had earned him the name Slippery Fish. But though I am tone deaf where religion is concerned, it doesn't stop me from realising that the world had lost someone who might one day have become a wise, kind rabbi and a first-rate spiritual leader. He, too, had now gone down into what Denis calls The Bloodless Abattoir.

As my eyes roamed over the glinting grey sea ahead, although it was only hours after his disappearance, I couldn't stop myself from speculating on how soon I might set about replacing him in Ruth's affections.

Cowering under the bedclothes in a house belonging to some distant cousins in North London, I tried to ignore the dread roar of <doodlebugs' passing overhead. Their menacing engines drove away sleep for much of the night. On one occasion the pulsating sound seemed to stop directly overhead and at any moment I expected to die in a fiery blast of bricks and mortar. But the sturdy house merely shook itself like a dog coming out of water as, the missile exploded close by. Soon afterwards I went to sleep.

I was on leave and had come to town to attend my sister's wedding. It amazed me that the middle-aged sister spinsters who owned the house in which I was staying had not taken refuge under the Morrison shelter a reinforced metal table in the dining-room. My pride would not let me crawl into it while they slept soundly in their beds.

The wedding took place in a West End synagogue. The skies were cloudy in the morning but cleared in time for the ceremony. Hitler called off his V-1's attacks during the earlier part of the day. My parents were pleased that my sister was marrying within the faith. Not very observant themselves, perhaps they hoped that another generation as yet unborn would eventually make up for their own lack of piety.

Ruth Fischer, not unsurprisingly, had declined to attend the wedding she was currently staying with an aunt in Hampstead, waiting to go back to Canada. I telephoned and after some initial hesitation she agreed to see me.

I watched my sister in a white voile wedding dress and the groom in olive green uniform of the United States Army walking up the aisle of the synagogue. But my mind was obsessed with my appointment with Ruth later on.

The bearded Reform rabbi conducted the ceremony under the traditional white canopy. A choir sang. The bridegroom crushed a glass with his heel, symbolising the irreversible change that had taken place in his life. The bridal pair signed the register and when the photographers had snapped them from every conceivable angle, drove off in the bridal car to the reception in a nearby hotel.

I spoke to long-lost aunts, uncles and cousins during the festivities. To those who had lost loved ones I made the traditional wish for long life. I thought of trying to cheer them up with Bud's notions of life after death but his ideas seemed much too bizarre to offer real solace.

* * *

Ruth was staying with her Aunt Lilian, the widow of a wealthy film producer. Well known in artistic and intellectual circles, she was active in many patriotic and worthy causes. I had seen her name in the newspapers recently in connection with a scheme to raise money for the families of fallen servicemen. I tried not to be overawed, as I approached her large Edwardian house along a long winding drive. Looking down at the narrow stripe on my sleeve, I reminded myself that I was now the proud holder of the King's Commission.

A maid wearing a white apron and neat white cap opened the weathered-oak door, when I pressed the door-bell and welcomed me with the words: <You must be the Group Captain Mrs Hartman is expecting.' I didn't argue with this dizzying elevation in my rank. The interior of the house looked, in fact, as though it had never entertained anyone under the rank of Air Marshal. I was ushered into a spacious drawing-room containing large sofas covered in silk damask and ornate polished wooden furniture.

A tiny lady with a high colour in her cheeks and a gracious smile appeared. I caught a hint of a foreign accent, as she said: <I'm Ruth's aunt. You must be the young officer who befriended Bud and Ruth.'

<It was the other way around, really' I replied. <I first met them in Canada and they were very kind and hospitable to me.'

She said in a whisper: <Ruth is still hopeful her husband will be found. Do you think it is right she should hope?'

I said uncomfortably: <Bud may have bailed out over the Dutch or Belgian coasts but I'm afraid it is more likely that he ditched in the sea.'

<How long could he last in the sea?'

<I have heard of chaps being found after a week.'

<In that case it is very unlikely that he is alive. I suppose you have seen many of your fellow airmen die.'

Some perverse demon prompted me to say: <You rarely see them die. The ocean just swallows them up. My navigator has written a poem about it.'

<Really!' Mrs. Hartman's face lit up. <Most interesting. We are going to hold a competition shortly for poems about the war. Could you possibly persuade him to enter it.'

<I'll ask him', I replied, trying to imagine Denis's caustic reaction.

I enquired: <How is Ruth coping?'

<Not very well. I have told her she must go back to work. To dance again would be good for her. Have you seen her dance?'

<Just a few impromptu steps. She is very graceful.'

<A quite astounding talent. In some ways it was a pity she married. But I shouldn't say that Bud Fischer was a remarkable young man.'

<Where is Ruth?' I asked.

<She is in her room. I have arranged for you both to have dinner together. I am sure you have a lot to say to her. Unfortunately, I have to go out this evening to a committee meeting.'

There was a shattering roar as a <doodlebug' passed directly overhead. Mrs. Hartman betrayed no signs of having heard it. I clutched frantically at my throat. The ominous silence that followed was broken by a huge explosion. I grinned zanily and pretended that I had been adjusting my tie. Mrs. Hartman commented: <The Allies will soon capture the bases where those horrible things are coming from.'

Recently, while flying off the Dutch coast, I had seen high in the sky away to the East the exhaust trails of longer-range V2 rocket missiles which I believe have just started to hit London. These long-range rockets are even more alarming than the V-1's because they arrive without warning. The Government has not acknowledged them. But having read reports of mysterious explosions in the London area, I suspected the existence of a new type of missile. There was no point in mentioning it to Mrs. Hartman.

Ruth appeared at that moment, wearing a dark blue dress. She kissed me on the cheek and then said to her aunt: <Isn't he a great guy, coming all this way to see me.' And turning to me: <How was the wedding?'

<Very good. I was sorry you couldn't be there, but I fully understand your reasons.'

Ruth glanced briefly down at the floor and said: <It wasn't right for me to come.' She turned to her aunt and said: <Have you offered Alex a drink?'

The old lady said: <Oh, dear, no. I am so busy these days I don't know where I am. We still have some sherry left. And some port and, I believe, some tokay my late husband brought over some years ago.'

I requested an orangeade. My head was still muzzy from drinking champagne at the wedding.

Mrs. Hartman rang a bell. The maid came in and poured drinks. Both ladies drank sherry from crystal glasses. I was reminded of an occasion when my mother, examining similar glasses in a shop window, had tut-tutted hopelessly because she couldn't afford them.

Shortly afterwards, someone called to take Mrs. Hartman to her committee meeting. I sat opposite Ruth at a large table in a dining-room with a heavily-curtained massive bay window, while the maid served soup from a fine porcelain tureen. When she left the room, Ruth said: <My aunt is very unhappy. Pam, her last remaining maid, is about to be called up into the Land Army. Lilian and Imre, her husband, had a large staff before the war.'

<There are worse things than lack of servants. How are you coping?'

<Okay. I have started ballet exercises again. I intend to return to dancing just as soon as I get back home. I only gave it up because I fell in love with Bud.'

<All that exercising must be agonising. What makes you want to endure such torture?'

She shook her head. <Dancing is such a wonderful way of expressing one's innermost feelings. No other art form can match it.'

<Painting's a bit easier on the body.'

Ruth gave a little laugh.

<Bud used to say that I only danced to work up an appetite for hot dogs. I adored them when I was in New York.'

I noticed, as she spoke, her stiff-backed posture which accentuated the swelling roundness of her small breasts. I told myself that if I worked hard at being as loving and attentive and entertaining as Bud, she would eventually care for me.

Her face was slightly flushed and she became more talkative during the meal, asking an interminable series of questions about aircrew who came down in the sea. Were there any rations in the dinghy. Would he have had drinking water. And so on.

Her words brought images into my mind of Bud's last hours. I conjured up vivid pictures of him lying in an orange rubber cradle, lost in a vast expanse of sea, his hopes being alternately raised and dashed as aircraft passed overhead.

Eventually, I said pleadingly: <Ruth no more, please! If word hasn't come through from the Red Cross by now that he has been taken prisoner, you must resign yourself to the fact that he is dead.'

Ruth shot me a puzzled glance. She offered me more wine and when I refused poured some for herself. I had thought it best that she should know the truth.

<This helps, you know,' she said, raising her glass. <Bud once pointed out to me a sign in a pub which said: ?We sell the best anaesthetic known to man alcohol." Which reminds me he had his appendix out while we were in Boston and he said afterwards that it had strengthened his belief in immortality, because being under an anaesthetic is exactly the same as dying. When you wake up, you don't know whether you've been unconscious for an hour or a billion years.'

<I think Bud had a sort of fascination with death.'

<He often said that since Time is purely subjective, it cannot possibly be the enemy we all imagine it to be. He was something of a mystic. It's terribly hard to live with someone like that.

<How did he reconcile his desire to be a rabbi with becoming a pilot?'

<He had no doubt at all that it is the duty of everyone to take up arms. He surprised everyone, though, by leaving university when he was doing so well. He was quite unpredictable. He used to astonish my parents by getting roaring drunk at the Passover, insisting that this was in accordance with the spirit of the Festival. He loved poking fun at the ancient rabbis' commentaries in the Haggadah. But he acknowledged that if they sound funny to us, it is only because they were speaking according to the spirit of their times. He pointed out that some of our sayings will seem just as absurd to those who come after us. Don't you think he himself was something of a genius?'

I nodded agreement and then asked: <How much longer do you think you will be in England?'

<Perhaps a month. I'm not sure how long it will take to arrange my passage home. Aunt Lilian wants me to stay longer.'

<Can I come and see you again?'

<If you like.' After a while, she said: <Did you manage to contact that girl friend who was posted away?'

<No.'

<Bud said she seemed a nice girl.'

<She was.'

I looked down at my table napkin, not wishing to be reminded of my ignominious failure.

<I am sure you will find someone else soon.'

<I'll find someone Jewish next time. It is easier, don't you think, if married couples are of the same religion.'

<Do you want to get married?' Ruth enquired.

<Of course. Isn't that normal?' <I used to think so....'

Ruth grimaced and then, very carefully and methodically, poured out the remaining wine.

I said: <You and Bud seemed the ideal couple.'

Ruth held her stemmed glass with both hands and said: <We were. But even an ideal relationship can't be ideal all the time. We rushed into marriage when Bud was offered a engineering place at Harvard. I was embarrassed when we were first married and living in Boston because he always insisted on wearing a yarmulke in public. He was very proud of being Jewish. I told him he was likely to provoke anti-semitism but he wouldn't listen. Once or twice things did get stirred up but he was such a big guy he could always take care of anybody who got physical. Then when war broke out he volunteered for the Canadian Air Force. He wasn't accepted, so he joined the Royal Air Force instead.'

<You must be very proud of him.'

<Of course. <I think if he had achieved his ambition of becoming a rabbi, he would have been forever in dispute with the authorities. But I loved him for it. He swept away all my own doubts about religion and so I even gave up dancing for him. I was quite sure I was doing the right thing when I married him. But, of course I didn't know then that he was going to volunteer to become a pilot...'

<Do you regret it?'

<There's no point. It has been wonderful knowing him. Anybody else seems very dull in comparison. Of course I am sorry I had to give up dancing, which I had always intended to make my whole life. Now I shall have to try to start again where I left off. It's as well we didn't start a family. I think Bud must have had a premonition that he would die.'

<You enjoyed being on stage?'

<It was wonderful. It was like being in a large happy family. It was fun. It was so liberating, especially after living in a tight, puritanical Jewish community.'

<Liberating?'

<Sexually liberating.'

I looked at Ruth with some amazement. I had seen her as the virtuous rebbetzen the rabbi's wife and here she was talking about being sexually liberated something which I was not and seemed at the moment unlikely ever to be. Obviously a little drunk, she went on: <Bud was furious when he found out that I had had other lovers. He swore at me and then, typical Bud, forgot about it almost immediately and said I must marry him as soon as possible. I asked him why and he said so that I shouldn't sleep with anybody else ever again. I promised him I never would and...'

Ruth started crying. In between her sobs she said: <At least I kept my word. He was a wonderful lover.'

I walked round to her side of the table and put my arm round her.

<It was all fated,' I said, <so that you'll be a famous ballerina one day, which is probably better than being a rabbi's wife.'

<I would have been a good rabbi's wife,' she said, still sobbing. <I would have tried very hard...'

Shortly afterwards, I caught the last bus back to the house in North Finchley where I was staying. The following morning I caught a train down to Hartington and was terribly bored in that sleepy seaside town, where the war seemed to exist merely to fill the news columns in the newspapers.

<It would be a great life if the enemy didn't shoot at us.' somebody remarked the other day. When off duty, we drink in the mess, play snooker or go down to the Barley Mow. Occasionally, when an aircraft has been in for an overhaul which alters its magnetic field we fly it over the sea and fire the cannon on due north, restoring the values on the deviation correction cards. And occasionally we go on training courses I recently returned to Turnberry to renew my torpedo-dropping skills.

I telephone Ruth several times a week. She doesn't seem to mind. It is almost like having a regular girl friend. I tell myself that if I help her through this first difficult phase of mourning, she might eventually consider marrying me. The last time I telephoned she asked if Bud was missed by the other pilots on the Squadron. I replied, <Of course, we're always talking about him.' Which isn't true. The dead are rarely mentioned. I reminded her that when I called the maid had confused me with a Group Captain.'

Ruth replied: <She got you mixed up with a friend of Lilian's, Group Captain Fitch.'

Who hadn't heard of Group Captain ?Zingo" Fitch, DFC, DSO and Bar, a famous fighter pilot waiting to take up his appointment as Air Attaché in Washington! Lilian Hartman had apparently co-opted him onto one of her committees.

I told her: <I can't compete with an ace fighter pilot.'

Ruth rebuked me quietly: <Don't be silly. I'm in mourning.'

<Of course. I was only joking. I do miss you, though. If I came to London some time, would you mind if I called on you.'

<Yes, do by all means. London's boring. I hate these V2's.'

The official announcement regarding these rocket weapons, which arrived without warning and caused great havoc, and carnage had just been announced.

<I've seen their exhaust trails in the skies over Holland... Have you any idea when you're going back to Canada?'

<It's very difficult to get a passage home. But while I'm waiting Aunt Lilian has asked me to do some work for her. She has to go into hospital for an exploratory operation.'

<I'm sorry to hear that. Give her my best wishes for a speedy recovery.'

I said goodbye and wandered back into the Mess.

Sitting in a leather armchair, I thumbed through an old copy of Training Magazine. Pilot Officer Prune, that mythical, accident-prone pilot, had died again, this time through failing to check his magnetos. I smoked a State Express and remembered Bud's unavailing effort to give up smoking by buying cheap brands. There was little point in economising. I decided to spend my small savings on Ruth.

I heard a loud crump and went to the window to investigate. A black plume of smoke was rising on the far side of the airfield. A visiting Lockheed Hudson had just plunged into the ground. Another pilot joined me at the window. We looked at each other. He shrugged. A fire engine and an ambulance were on their way to the crashed aircraft. There was nothing we could do. I returned to my armchair and as my eyes wandered over the headlines in the News Chronicle, I remembered my last sweep around the Frisian islands.

* * *

We had set out in the late afternoon the day after Bud went missing. The air was satin smooth. The sun glinted crimson off the dull grey metal of the Beaufighters all around me as we departed from Spurn Head. It struck me that my curt response to Denis's complaint about his blurred vision had been unfair. Even if my suspicion had been correct that he was malingering, I was in no position to cast stones. I now realised that my loss of appetite had been nothing more than sheer funk. Denis's wound had obviously affected him. In an attempt to raise his morale, I asked: <Did you ever finish that poem?'

There was silence he was absorbed in checking his dead reckoning. Eventually, he replied: <I did a little work on it while I was on Sick Leave.'

<Okay, let's have a sample.'

<You'll only rubbish it.'

<No, I won't.'

After a pause, Denis spoke into the inter-com:

<The sea is a carnivore

Which swallows all in its bloodless maw

and sheds no tears for wasted years.

Its monstrous hunger can ne'er be sated

Its dreadful thirst goes unabated.

Sailors, ships, aircrew and planes

Are all engulfed as dark remains.

I shall go down to the sea again.

But the lonely sea and the sky

Will be unknown to me,

As the waves move on high.

I said: <Go on.'

<That's all I've done so far. What did you think?'

<You've got something there, Poet.'

<Okay, Toothpaste.'

He seemed a little disappointed at the faint praise I had granted his embryonic poem.

There is scarcely room to move one's elbows in the cramped cockpit of the Beaufighter. I looked down at my blue-clad knees and quickly looked up again to check that my wingtip was correctly located a few feet away from the lead aircraft. Would we find a target this time, I wondered.

My very first operation on joining the squadron had consisted of a lone mission to locate and photograph Danish fishing vessels. Intelligence wanted to check that they were not spying for the Germans. Denis and I had buzzed the vessels at very low level and we had returned with photographs, one of them clearly showed the skipper smoking a stubby pipe as he stared at us from the bridge. It had been thoughtful of the wing-commander to break us in so gently. In contrast, Bud, on his first operation, had been sent on a mass strike which had sustained several casualties.

Now he was missing.

Had he been shot down by a nightfighter or by anti-aircraft fire during the course of a moonlight attack on an enemy ship? Or had he committed one of those fatal errors of airmanship that kill Pilot Officer Prune time after time. No one would ever know.

I couldn't help experiencing elation at the thought of offering comfort to Ruth. Fate, I was sure, would allow me to see her again. It is an odd thing but one feels superior to the dead. It is wicked. It is also totally illogical and cruel. But it is also human. Fate has smiled on me, so I must be worth smiling on. If I feel contrition for that arrogant thought, it doesn't last long. Society doesn't want me to feel compassion and pity in war-time. It wants me to be tough, sanguine, and full of spunk. Talking of which, I experience an excited throbbing in my loins every time I think of Ruth. A pang of conscience stabs me, as I remember that I had coveted her even while Bud was still alive. I had dreamed of her as Salome.

I must concentrate on accurate flying.

Edging a little closer to the lead aircraft, I look along its metal fuselage and see the navigator training his Browning-gun on some invisible point in the sky, practising for the strike we would soon make.

I looked down at the sea. Hardly a wave-cap anywhere. I remarked to Denis: <Very little wind at the surface. What is it up here?'

<The forecast is easterly at ten knots.'

<I'd knock a couple off that, if I were you. It looks dead calm.'

<Yes, skipper.'

There was a slightly caustic note in his acknow-ledgement. How dare I interfere in his esoteric art!

How were thing at Hartington, I wondered. No need to guard the water works with my Lee Enfield rifle now. Hitler would never invade us all he could do was make malevolent attacks with his lethal V-weapons. We had invaded Europe and would soon be at the black heart of Germany itself. Millions had died. Millions of my fellow Jews were under imminent threat of death, it was rumoured. Millions of Russians had died on the Eastern Front. But I was still alive. The world had finally found a useful job for me, diving on Germans ships and raking them with machine guns and cannon fire. Tonight, though, I was privileged to be one of the select band carrying a torpedo. I would make the long, lonely run-in, as other Beaufighters overwhelmed the anti-aircraft gunners with rockets and cannon.

I recalled that two nights previously the Wing-Commander had bought me a beer at the bar. A small sign of favour. Not that I had done anything to deserve it. Apart, that is, from joining in rather recklessly in a game of cushion-rugby, during which my neck had nearly been dislocated. I had made little fuss even though it felt very bruised. He had probably bought me a drink out of gratitude at seeing a familiar face among all the new arrivals.

He is a bluff, tough uncommunicative man. Sgt. Gill, who once threatened to shoot him down, has gone the way of his cousin. Those who live by the sword etc. Strange how these biblical phrases linger in the mind.

I suddenly remembered a verse I had once come across in a novel by Compton Mckenzie.

<We are the nephews of uncles of war

Too witty and wise to complain and feel sore

That all the best fruit has been handled before

And all the best stories been told.'

I repeat the verse to Denis over the intercom. He asks what it is supposed to mean. I tell him that war makes us increasingly cynical and callous. He just grunts and gets on with whatever he is doing. A pale moon is in the sky. I think he is taking a sextant sight on its cusp. No real value as a navigational aid but he likes practising his astro-navigation, a peculiar art, not necessary in these narrow waters. Perhaps he would like a posting to a flying-boat squadron. So would I, come to that. A little more peaceful. Not all the time, though.

I wonder about Bud again.

A more unlikely aspirant rabbi it would be hard to imagine. He smoked a lot and occasionally drank alarming quantities of booze. Not that he was a totally indiscriminating drunk. But as the Irish say, he liked his drop. Nor was he a stickler for the rules like my parents, who are rigidly puritanical. He was generous to a fault. He loved his wife madly. Nevertheless he allowed her to travel to war-time England to be with him. Was that inconsiderate of him? No, he probably imagined they were both immortal. We all suffer from that illusion.

He had tried to convert me back to Judaism but totally without success. I don't give a monkey's (is that a pun?) for all that Adam and Eve nonsense. I believe in Natural Selection and Darwin and always will.

I remember an exchange of views Bud and I had in the Barley Mow one night just before it closed. I had recently been reading H G Wells History of The World and I said to Bud: <Our religion is tribal and based on an archaic national programme of agriculture. All those funny seasonal festivals and so on. It's so parochial. Why should the word of the Lord go forth from Jerusalem. Why not from Timbuktu?'

<Yeah, why not, Alex.' he replied, pretending to take me seriously. <New York would be better. There are more Jews in New York than anywhere else. Let the voice of the Lord go forth from the Bronx. '

And he fixed me with an amused eye.

I responded, impatiently: <What a load of old codswallop! The real truth of the matter is that you live and die and then get thrown into a hole in the ground. Prove to me that we survive in some other world and I'll believe in religion.'

Bud gulped some beer and pointedly indicated his empty glass.

I went to the bar, knowing that I had defeated him, although at the same time I felt a little guilty about disturbing his faith. I needn't have worried. When I returned with the drinks, he said: <Okay, wise guy, you want proof that there is another world. Tell me this: when you look in a mirror what do you see?'

<I see myself.'

<Just as you are?'

<Yes, exactly.'

<Where is your right hand?'

'Opposite my right hand.'

<Then your right hand has become your left hand.'

<But what difference does that make?'

<It means that you are seeing into a Looking Glass world. The person looking back at you is indistinguishable from you, except that his left hand is where your right hand is. When you leave the mirror, you don't know where your opposite number has gone. God made mirrors to remind us that there are other invisible worlds. You wanted proof that there are worlds within worlds and you've got it. Go on, go and look.' He pointed to a mirror etched with the word Guinness behind the bar.

<Don't be stupid. I think you must be pissed.'

<We never see reality. We see only what we have trained ourselves to see.' He struggled with his wallet again to bring out his little diagram the one with the chalice that can be seen as two faces.

<I said, caustically: <Don't bother. I've seen it before countless times.'

We went on to have a much more satisfactory discussion about the relative merits of Mosquitoes and Beaufighters, during the course of which we got very drunk.

It is hard to believe the poor deluded fool is missing.

One of Bud's less endearing characteristics was his habit of using his superior education to undermine my commonsense view of the world. I used to complain: <You're just trying to blind me with science.' But even though he made me painfully aware of my educational deficiencies, I used to enjoy our debates.

I was brooding over this, when Denis's voice came over the inter-com, <I think I saw a dinghy.'

<You thought you saw a dinghy. You either saw one or you didn't.'

<It passed underneath us a little to the left.'

<Are you sure?'

<I'm almost sure but my right eye's a bit fuzzy.'

This last phrase put me in a dilemma. If I left the formation it would be in breach of orders. If I flew on, ignoring what Denis had just told me, the supposed dinghy might never be found. Precious seconds passed as I tried to decide what to do.

Denis's voice again came through the earphones: <I'm almost sure I saw one.'

<Hell!'

I tugged at the control column, pulled away from the formation and went into a left turn so steep that I could feel the blood rushing to my head. Once on a reciprocal heading, I examined the featureless patch of water over which we had passed some minutes before. The low sun was dazzling. I scanned the expanse of glinting sea for a while without seeing anything, then cursed again, turned round and set off to catch up with the formation, by now twenty or more nautical miles ahead. I opened up to maximum power, calculating that it would take at least an hour to join them. Our briefing had stated that this would be a sweep as far as Heligoland and then back along a track parallel to the Frisian islands. I decided that my best chance of catching up with the formation would be to meet up with them on their return journey along the Dutch islands.

I asked Denis for a new course. He acknowledged with a grunt. When I was established on it, I repeated: <Did you or did you not see a dinghy.'

<I saw an orange object. But my eye keeps watering and I couldn't identify it positively as a dinghy.'

<I didn't see anything.'

<You took long enough making up your mind to go back.'

<It's against orders to leave the formation.'

<Not on an errand of mercy,'

There was silence as I chewed over his remark.

It was growing dark. Soon, I could make out on our right the shape of the first of the Dutch islands a long low wedge of land under a blanket of charcoal cloud. White sands stood out in the semi-darkness. I was glad of the protective cloud cover just above us, as I flew eastwards parallel to the island. My mind meanwhile kept reverting to the supposed sighting. If I had turned at the moment Denis reported seeing a dinghy and found it, we would have been able to pass on an accurately plotted position to Intelligence after landing at North Camber. This would have enabled Air Sea Rescue to set off at dawn to pick up the missing airman. Was saving a human life more important than taking part in a mass attack on some German ships? Either way it could cost lives. My absence would have weakened the attack, possibly leading to unnecessary losses. Certainly, my commanding officer would not approve of the action I had taken.

I flew eastwards for another ten minutes. And then, against a dark background, saw the silhouette of a large white ship accompanied by two smaller vessels. My heart began pounding. I had found the target. The big question was should I take it on alone. I decided to wait until the whole might of the Beaufighter strike force returning on a westerly track was available. The prospect of facing the concentrated anti-aircraft fire of several ships on a lonely torpedo-run was daunting. I continued to fly eastwards. Shortly afterwards, a line of aircraft appeared directly ahead flying westwards. I switched on my navigation lights, waggled my wings and joined the section I had left an hour or so before, ready to join in a combined assault on the ships.

Shortly afterwards, the Wing-Commander broke radio-silence to announce that he could see Red Crosses on the side of the larger vessel. <Do not attack- Do not attack,' he called out.

We continued westwards in darkness. No weapons had been fired. I had been saved from sinking a hospital ship. But my hesitation over whether to break off from the formation to search for the dinghy had probably resulted in the loss of someone's life. I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that it might have been Bud's.

On the way home, I repeatedly questioned Denis but he stuck stubbornly to his original statement that he thought he had seen a dinghy but couldn't be absolutely sure.

Denis's blurred vision was found to be due to a small sliver of material which the surgeon had missed during his operation. He was taken off flying duties in order to undergo further medical treatment. He had repeated at our debriefing his supposed sighting of a dinghy. But because of his vagueness the Intelligence Officer was unable to make out a convincing case for an Air Sea Rescue search in the area.

Since Bud was now reported Missing Believed Killed in Action, I asked for permission to visit Mrs. Fischer, but my request was turned down. A few days later, however, the Group Captain called me into his office, pointed towards a small communications aircraft standing on the tarmac and said: <Could you fly the Proctor down to Group Head Quarters in London, deliver some papers for me and return early tomorrow morning?'

I replied eagerly: <Of course, Sir.'

My request had been granted with an aeroplane thrown in!

Frank Couts accompanied me. I hadn't flown a light aircraft for some time. We swayed drunkenly along the runway before becoming precariously airborne. I levelled out at one thousand feet, trying to master an unfamiliar machine that seemed to have a mind of its own. We landed at an airfield near London with a series of kangaroo-like bounces.

Frank went off on a private errand. I took a taxi to Group H Q, delivered the package and then telephoned Ruth. She seemed delighted to hear my voice and invited me to call on her.

<How is your aunt Lilian?' I enquired when she had ushered me in.

<Not too well. The surgeons have found a growth. She is having an operation in a few days.'

<I'm sorry to hear it. How have you been passing the time?'

<Zingo has taken me to a couple of committee meetings.'

I remembered the famous Group Captain with whom I had been confused the first time I visited the house and felt a pang of jealousy.

<I believe he's a terrific fighter pilot. How many enemy aircraft has he notched up?'

<He doesn't talk about it. He is being briefed at the moment about his appointment in Washington and then he's going home on leave to the family farm in Yorkshire where his wife and two children are at present. Incidentally, he has very kindly offered Pam, our maid, a job on his farm. She has been called up into the Land Army.'

My jealousy was not entirely stilled by the news that he was married.

<What exactly do you do on these committees?'

<We try to keep track of promised subscriptions and of the artists who have agreed to appear in some of our productions. They are both equally elusive.'

<No word yet of your passage to Halifax?'

<No. I'm not chasing it up for the moment because I promised Lilian I would look after the house while she's in hospital. Would you like some tea?'

<Thank you.'

I sat on a fragile-looking chair with pink and white striped seat covering in the drawing-room. Ruth returned shortly with two cups of tea and some biscuits. She informed me that she had made the latter herself.

'Very good,' I said appreciatively. <You have other talents besides dancing.'

Ruth sat in an adjoining armchair with a curved back and sipped her tea thoughtfully. Her hair had been cut unfashionably short but she still looked amazingly attractive. I noticed that she occasionally blinked nervously.

After glancing down at her finely-shaped instep, for want of something to say, I remarked: <I suppose you have to do plenty of exercise to strengthen your leg muscles.'

<What?...Oh, yes. Sorry. I was thinking of something else.'

<What were you thinking about?'

<I was thinking how Bud would have loved to have flown fighters.'

<We can't all be air aces.'

<And I was wondering whether, if he hadn't been killed, he would have gone back to Harvard.'

I said gently: <Ruth, you must stop thinking of might-have-beens. Bud would want you to look to the future.'

<You're quite right,' Ruth said sadly. <But I do miss him so.'

I asked about her family in Montreal. Her parents, she told me, were frantic with worry and wanted her to go home as quickly as possible.

I commented: <It's a tug-of-war. I want you here, they want you there.'

<I'm afraid they are going to win,' Ruth said politely. <I hope you will find yourself a girlfriend soon.'

<I prefer to wait.'

<Wait for what?'

I looked mournful but didn't reply.

Ruth compressed her lips and said: <Don't rest your hopes on me, Alex. I shall be back in Canada soon. You'll find someone else. Incidentally, Bud told me you were having problems with your last girl friend.'

<What did he say?'

<He just said you were rather unsure of yourself.'

<I wouldn't have confided in him, if I had known he would tell you.'

Ruth replied: <Don't get upset. Everything will be hunkydory for you once you find the right girl.'

<I don't want another girl.'

<Oh, come on,' Ruth said teasingly. <You're a cute-looking guy. You'll have no difficulty.'

<I have already found the girl I want to marry.'

Ruth shook her head slowly and sadly and then asked: <What would you like to do when the war is over?'

<Partner you as a ballet dancer.' I added quickly: <I was only joking. I may consider going into Civil Aviation.'

<That would be great. At least you already know how to fly.'

<You wouldn't say that if you could have seen me flying down here. I make too many mistakes.'

<Do you think that is what happened to Bud?'

<I doubt it. He was an excellent pilot and a very brave man who died doing his duty. He had a tremendous amount to offer the world. I shall always miss him.'

Ruth sat quietly for a while. Then she went away and reappeared shortly carrying a piece of paper which she handed to me. I recognised Bud's firm, distinctive handwriting. It was headed: Truly The Last Supper.

Scene: A Passover Table. A bearded figure sitting alone at the centre of a long table says: <My fellow rabbis have died along with the rest of the world's population. Everyone heeded my message of peace. The warring tribes beat their swords into ploughshares. Nation spake unto nation. There was a period of unprecedented cooperation in every field of science. Tremendous advances were made in technology. The nations amalgamated until eventually only two separate powers remained: one was called the Union of Abel, the other the Federation of Cain. These two mighty nations went to war. The Ox mightily gored Behemoth and Behemoth mightily gored the Ox. All Thy servants have perished, Oh Lord, why oh why did you bring peace on Earth! In your infinite wisdom you should have known that it's better to have many small wars than one huge one. '

I handed the paper back to Ruth.

<What does it mean?'

<I just grabbed this one off the top of the pile.' She glanced at it. <Oh, this is just one of his pensées. It must have been written when he was in a sceptical mood. Others are deeply religious. It's one of hundreds of papers Bud asked me to keep in the event of his death. Most of them are quite learned essays on various abstruse aspects of Jewish law. Some of them are themes for sermons he intended to preach when he was appointed a rabbi. Some of them are a little strange, like the one I have just showed you. Others are quite funny. He even drew little cartoons. What do you think I should do with them?'

<Perhaps when you go back to Montreal you should give them to someone qualified to make use of them.'

<The one I've just showed you was just some fanciful notion. But taken as a whole his papers can be seen as a very distinctive body of work representing a very personal view of the world.'

'It would be a shame to throw them away.'

I said this grudgingly. Raising Bud's status seemed to diminish my own. I added: <He was certainly crazy about religion.'

Ruth commented: <He was crazy to join up. He should have completed his course at Harvard first. His parents are distraught.'

She suddenly broke down in tears.

I tried to comfort her. After a while, I said: <He had a clear-sighted recognition of what was happening in the world. He obviously felt he had to combat it. A rabbi who fought the enemy in his youth would be much more respected than one who remained safely at home.'

<Do you think so?'

<I certainly do.'

We ate a frugal meal and then went to a local cinema. Ruth wept again during a sentimental film about star-crossed war-time lovers.

The night air was chilly as we walked back to her aunt's house. I put my arm around her to help keep her warm. She gave a little shudder and snuggled closer. It made me feel both protective and proud.

<What time do you have to be back at North Camber?' Ruth asked when we entered the house.

<I'd like to get a taxi at five a.m. I'm due back at base early tomorrow morning.'

Ruth arranged for a taxi to call and then showed me to my room. I tentatively kissed her face. She patted my cheek and said: <Thank you for coming to see me. It was wonderful being with you again And take great care of yourself.'

Frank Couts was waiting for me the following morning in the Control Tower at the airfield where we had landed the previous day. He had visited a girl friend and was in excellent humour.

<How did you get on?' he enquired. I had neglected to tell him that I was visiting Bud Fischer's widow.

<I was given a kiss for my pains,' I said humbly.

<I got more than that,' he replied with a cheerful grin.

During the flight back we ran through heavy rain and severe turbulence. The smile had gone from his face by the time we landed back at North Camber. In fact, he looked quite green.

The flat Lincolnshire landscape surrounding the airfield looked desolate and forlorn. There had been a prolonged period of low cloud and rain. Several operational sorties had to be aborted because of the weather. One, however, was spectacularly successful, when we hit a small armada of ships off the North Dutch coast on their way to replenish the armaments of the hard-pressed Wehrmacht in the low Countries. Denis Coleridge returned to duty after a second operation on his eye. Frank Couts, who had saved my life by warning me not to dive into the sea, was lost together with his pilot.

I telephoned Ruth frequently and was relieved to learn that Group Captain ?Zingo" Fitch would shortly leave for Washington. Jealousy affected me whenever I heard his name. On one occasion when I telephoned her, she said: <Alex, I really appreciate all you've done for me. From now on I think you should concentrate on finding yourself a suitable girlfriend. You mustn't waste your time and money telephoning me.'

I replied: <I'd rather talk to you than anyone else in the world.'

I usually mentioned Bud. This time I enquired about his parents. I also asked about her aunt. Ruth, however, refused to take the hint, when I casually mentioned that I had nowhere to stay in London. So I wrote her the following letter.

Dearest Ruth,

I thought you might like to know that somebody mentioned Bud in the mess the other day and said he'd surely have been up for a <gong', if he had survived. Bud's own opinion was that medals should only be awarded posthumously. He greatly admired the Japanese kamikaze pilots who have been flying straight into American ships lately. The newspapers call them mad fanatics. But Bud said it was mean spirited to underestimate their courage and devotion to duty.

Things are quiet here at the moment. I do wish I could see you when I get some leave. Hartington is boring it is sometimes referred to as ?a place where the young don't know how to live and the old don't know how to die." It would be great if I could find somewhere to stay in town and take you out to dinner one evening and perhaps to a concert.

Something interesting happened to me recently. A squadron up at Banff in Scotland, celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary, issued an invitation for one commissioned and one non-commissioned rank to attend. I flew up there with Leading Aircraftsman Howard Carson, a mechanic. It was a great party. Lots of funny toasts. An apparently endless supply of beer and spirits and food. I ate and drank excessively. We stayed the night and took off next morning for North Camber.

After crossing the Scottish border on our way home my back started to itch unbearably. Strapped tightly in my harness, I could do nothing to relieve the tickling sensation, except hunch my shoulders and wriggle madly. The itching got steadily worse and eventually I found myself perspiring and heaving great breaths. The irritation took possession of my whole body, making it difficult to fly accurately. Leading AirCraftsman Carson, sitting in the navigator's position, remained commendably calm. But as he told me afterwards, he was greatly alarmed at our haphazard progress through the sky. My map-reading suffered through lack of concentration. Fortunately the weather was good. Squirming frantically in my harness, I turned for the coast and followed it until I caught sight of Spurn Head and headed towards the nearby airfield. I landed in haste and sprinted towards the Sick Bay.

The medical officer asked me to strip and eyed with great interest the great upraised areas the size of saucers a quarter of an inch deep that had developed all over my body. He then told me to stand in the middle of the room and called in half a dozen nurses. I found myself standing naked in the company of six nubile young women, heartily wishing it had been the other way around .?This," he announced with profound satisfaction, "is the finest example of urticaria I have seen during the whole of my medical career."

Pastries made with contaminated tinned pineapple had very nearly caused the loss of one of his Majesty's aircraft! I dabbed calamine lotion on the raised weals, as instructed, and twenty-four hours later I was fit for duty again.

My best wishes to Lilian.

Please write to me soon,

Your ever affectionate,

Alex.

A few days later I found a letter in my post box from Ruth inviting me to stay with her next time I was granted leave.

Bud's mother wrote to me from Canada. She thanked me for the friendship I had shown towards her son and expressed the hope that I would come through the war safely. I mentioned her letter, when I telephoned Ruth to tell her when I would be arriving in London. Before going on leave, I withdrew the whole of my savings from my bank account.

King's Cross station was surrounded by blitzed buildings, the result of past bombings and the current attack on London by V-1 pilotless missiles and V-2 rockets. Casting a nervous glance upwards, I left the railway station and caught a bus to Hampstead. During the journey we passed through whole streets of houses which had been turned into ugly heaps of rubble.I decided that the laws of chance made it unlikely that I would be killed, reminding myself that the lions in Africa take only a few of the thousands of gazelles that go down to the watering holes.

Alighting from the bus at Hampstead, I saw a jeweller's shop, its windows boarded to give protection against bomb blast. After examining some jewellery in the gloomy interior, I purchased a Victorian brooch to give to Ruth in appreciation of her hospitality. I hoped she might see in my small gift something of deeper significance.

A new maid greeted me when I arrived at the front door of the Hartman residence. She was ginger-haired, freckled and quite pretty. She told me her name was Stella. After taking my coat she threw a cheerful wink over her shoulder on her way to the cloak room.

Ruth appeared, looking pale and withdrawn. She directed me to the bedroom I had occupied previously. As I unpacked my few things, I wondered whether I had made the right decision in coming to see her. I was greeted by the sound of a Schubert impromptu as I came down the stairs. Ruth was playing a Steinway piano in the drawing-room with considerable fluency and charm. I clapped enthusiastically when she had finished. Ruth shook her head and said: <I've been practising that piece all week and I just can't get it right.'

<Sounded great to me.'

<I know when I'm playing badly.'

<The V-2s have probably thrown you.'

<Yes, you're quite right. As a matter of fact that's why I said you could stay here. I'm terrified of being alone.'

` I told her my theory about the lions and the gazelles. She responded with a rueful smile, <How do I know I won't be the one they decide to eat?'

<You'd have to be very unlucky. Incidentally, I think you move just like a gazelle.'

<Thank you.'

<I bet you could imitate a gazelle encountering a lion.'

Ruth gave a wistful smile and posed briefly, her body stiff with fear, outstretched hands trembling. She then walked over to a writing-desk, picked up a gilt-framed photograph and said: <Aunt Lilian was a dancer before she met Uncle Imre. This is their wedding photograph taken in Budapest in 1912.'

<When did they come over here?'

<Just before the First World War.'

<Did they have any children?'

<No. They were both very heavily involved in the film industry.'

No one in my family had ever mixed with famous and affluent film producers. I suddenly felt totally out of my depth. It must have shown on my face, because Ruth said: <Don't look so miserable, Alex. Incidentally, why didn't you go to Hartington. It's much safer there.'

<It's Dullesville. I'd much rather be with you V-2's or no V-2's.'

<I'm not very good company at the moment.'

<Can I take you dancing.'

Ruth shook her head.

<It's much too soon for that sort of thing.'

<Bud wouldn't have minded.'

<It's what I want that counts.'

<You must miss him terribly.'

<Of course I do. But I appreciate your coming here.'

<Bud believed strongly in an afterlife. He once tried to persuade a WAAF that her dead boyfriend survived in another world.'

Ruth settled in a sofa opposite my chair, tucking her legs underneath her. My remark obviously interested her. She said: <It's very strange, but even when you're married to someone for years, you don't know everything about him. He was really quite a nervous guy. Sometimes, when he was having a bad spell, he used to hold me very tight for comfort in bed. At other times he was philosophical about being killed. He said I should remarry as soon as possible... But I certainly won't.' She added: <I intend to devote the rest of my life to dancing.'

I showed her the letter from Bud's mother.

After reading it, she commented: <She's a lovely lady. Incidentally, I appreciate your friendship as well.'

I wanted to say that my feelings went deeper than friendship, but I refrained. Instead, I said: <Let me take you out to dinner.'

We walked to a nearby restaurant. Ruth pointed out a Member of Parliament, a well-known left-wing intellectual who had recently written a book in the Gollancz Yellow Book Club describing life in Britain after the war under a socialist government. She said his views were misguided. I realised that our political views differed. Not that it worried me in the least.

At some stage the conversation languished and I was almost driven to quote from my joke book. But I remembered that Bud had advised me to be serious. The deep irony that I was using the strategy he had recommended to make an impression on his widow made me smile. Ruth then asked what was amusing me. Feeling somewhat confused, I decided to tell her a joke after all the one about an American general in London who pulled the toilet chain just as a V-2 fell nearby. Confusing cause with effect, he walked out of the house as it collapsed all around him and remarked: <These darned British never could make a decent plumbing system.'

Ruth laughed politely.

I said: <Sorry. But at least the joke is topical.'

A very good meal was served. I was happy at last. Here I was with a beautiful girl of my own age. And one day I hoped to earn the same love and devotion she had shown towards her late husband.

Ruth told me during the meal that her sister was doing well at the Juilliard music school in New York where she was studying the violin.

I asked: <Are you really dead set on going back into ballet?'

<Of course. I have already written to several companies asking for auditions when I return to North America.

<I shall have to come to Canada to watch you dance,'

<I might be in New York or Los Angeles,' she replied, with a light shrug.

<I'll be there wherever it is,' I replied earnestly.

A distant explosion made the lights flicker and caused the cutlery to rattle on the tables. The proprietor went outside with an anxious look on his face. He returned shortly afterwards and announced reassuringly: <Long way away. Long way away.'

But his words did little to reassure us. Everyone knew that V-2 rockets could hit anywhere at an time. Descending silently, swiftly and without warning like the angel of death, they were causing carnage and inflicting great damage.

I asked Ruth what she intended to do the following day.

<V-2's permitting,' she said with a nervous glance at the ceiling, I shall attend a committee meeting in the morning. I'm going to visit Lilian afterwards at Barts's hospital.'

<May I come with you to see her?'

<Yes, I'm sure she'd like your company. She said you were a very nice young man.'

My niceness was very shortly put to the test.

Ruth went left at the top of the wide, winding staircase in her aunt's house. I turned right and passing an open door, saw Stella standing completely naked in the bathroom, one foot on the edge of the bath, attending to her toe nails, her pear-shaped breasts pendant as she bent over. She straightened up, wriggled her slender hips and beckoned me to come inside. Making a great effort, I ignored her invitation and strode determinedly on towards my room, Apart from seeing Babs in the gloom of the hay barn, this was the first time I had seen a completely naked woman. Visions of her dazzling body kept me awake for a long time. Tormented as I was by lust for both the women in the house, I would have almost welcomed extinction by a V-2.

The following day, as we sat down to breakfast in the morning-room, Stella, wearing her maid's uniform, poured out tea for us from a porcelain teapot. She looked shy and demure. It was difficult to believe that she had brazenly tried to seduce me the night before.

Ruth, opposite me, enquired brightly if I would like an egg for breakfast. I remembered that I had not yet given her the ration card issued to me by the RAF for my week's leave and enquired: <How on earth did you manage to get eggs?'

<The gardener keeps hens.'

We discussed the war news. The Allies were heading for Paris. The Russians had made impressive gains. Ruth asked if the advances into Belgium and Holland had made much difference to my duties.

A vivid recollection came to me of a recent experience, when a column of German infantry appeared in my gunsight. Unfortunately, my navigator had just told me that we were over an island occupied by British troops and I had held my fire while he rechecked our position. By the time he had done so bullets from a German emplacement were clanging against the fuselage. We had been engaged at the time in a search along the coastline for miniature submarines that were attacking our shipping in Antwerp and had taken a short cut across the island.

I replied: <No, things are much the same.'

She was looking very dispirited. I tried to cheer her up by reminding her that the Allied armies would soon capture the sites in Holland from which the V-2 rockets were being launched. But she responded with a sceptical shrug. Trying another tack, I said: <It must have been hard giving up your dancing career.'

Wrinkling her brow, she replied: <I didn't mind at the time. It seemed so unimportant compared with helping Bud realise his ambitions.'

I replied: <His death is a great tragedy. He was exactly the sort of person we need to create a better post-war world.'

<I hope, when I go back home, to arrange for a foundation to be set up in his memory. I think his ideas deserve to be spread around. I was reading his notes last night and in one of them he says that human beings are poised to make a quantum leap in evolutionary development.'

<What exactly does that mean?' I asked, trying to disguise my lack of interest.

Ruth replied, again wrinkling her brow charmingly: <To tell the truth I don't really understand it. But he had an idea about our concept of NOW the moment that divides the past from the future. He said <Now' for future generations will expand, as part of our evolutionary development, to embrace a much larger portion of the past and the future. He says it's like flying. The higher you go the more you can see.'

I stared at Ruth blankly.

She smiled and went on: <His thesis is that the higher we go up the evolutionary scale the more our awareness of time expands. Bud took the view that this is God's intention.'

<It sounds a bit vague and woolly to me. Don't you think it is more important for you to forget about all that sort of stuff and get on with your own life.'

Ruth ground the fragments of her eggshell into small pieces with her spoon, looking downcast.

I then blundered by suggesting that instead of setting up a foundation she should make up a kind of private album instead.

Obviously angry with me, Ruth winced. She wiped her mouth abruptly on a napkin, stood up and announced that she was going to attend a War Bond committee. She added briskly: <Perhaps this afternoon, after we have seen Lilian in hospital, we'll go for a walk on Hampstead Heath.'

I remained in the morning-room, smoking and reading the Daily Telegraph.

Coming in to clear the table, Stella bent over me and whispered: <You were in a hurry to get to bed last night.'

<Do you always leave the bathroom door open?'

<Only for them as I favour.'

She paused in the act of removing the breakfast things, thrust her hips coquettishly against me and said: <What's the matter? Don't you like my figure?'

<I think it's splendid.'

<Well, then, what are you complaining of.'

<I'm not complaining. If you were posing in the Windmill theatre, I'd come along to see you.'

She gave an exaggerated shrug and swayed out of the room. I experienced a moment of regret for not having taken what had been so freely and generously offered. But I cheered up when I remembered that I would have Ruth all to myself that afternoon.

Sometimes when we argued, Bud used to say: <Logic can be the enemy of Truth,' I was given an inkling of what he meant when I read in the Daily Telegraph confirmation of a rumour which had been around for some time, but which nobody really believed, namely that the Nazis were using gas chambers to exterminate Jews. <This monstrous deed,' it says in its editorial, <is the inevitable extension of the perverted logic of National Socialism.' I wondered how Bud's unassailable faith in God would have survived this ghastly news. But he had always been so full of excuses for the Almighty that I guessed it wouldn't have made the slightest difference. There are people born to believe and others who are born to disbelieve, in the same way as some people are born tone deaf to music. I suppose I must come in the latter category.

I used to think sometimes that Bud was half mad. At the same time I couldn't help recognising that he had exceptional qualities. He was good looking in a rugged kind of way, well educated and confident. He also had an irresistible charm, which allowed him to banter with the lowest <erk' on the station as well as his superiors in rank. I once saw him patting the Wing Commander familiarly on the back as they laughed uproariously at some joke something I would never have dared do. Remembering all this, it seems impossible that I should ever be able to replace him in Ruth's affections.

I keep telling myself that the fact that Ruth and I are both nominally Jewish must improve my chances. It seems that one remains a Jew even if one has renounced Judaism. Bud once told me a joke about a Jew who informed his hunchback friend he had decided that from that day onwards he would no longer be a Jew. <That's a coincidence,' his friend exclaimed, because today I have decided I am no longer a hunchback.' Feeling somewhat more hopeful of my prospects of success with Ruth, I set about trying to solve the crossword puzzle.

Ruth reported, when she returned from her committee meeting, that Group Captain ?Zingo" Fitch was now in Washington. This news lifted a nagging worry from my mind I had not been entirely able to get rid of the notion that she was taken with him. After a light lunch, we took a taxi to Bart's Hospital to visit Ruth's aunt. I bought some chrysanthemums from a roadside stall before entering the hospital. I hardly recognised Lilian when we entered the small private ward. She seemed shrunken and yellow, her tiny head perched on an enormous white pillow. An apple-cheeked nurse, wearing a blue-and-white striped uniform-dress and a highly-starched white apron and cap, said as we entered: <She's making good progress, but don't stay long. She's still rather weak.'

Ruth leaned over the bed to kiss her aunt. I placed the chrysanthemums on the bedside-cupboard.

<How lovely,' she whispered. <Are you enjoying your leave?'

I nodded and smiled.

Ruth engaged her aunt in conversation, reporting what had happened on the committees and telling her of Group Captain Fitch's departure.

<So good of him to lend his name to our endeavours,' Lilian said in a weak voice. <Such a brave, nice man.'

I wandered over to the window while Ruth was discussing her aunt's medical condition. Apparently, whatever it was had been caught at an early stage and there was every prospect for a complete recovery.

Large white clouds were billowing. The thought crossed my mind that it would be very turbulent for anyone flying. A trace of something moving very rapidly caught my eye as it emerged from one of the more distant clouds. I assumed it was an aircraft spinning into the ground, until I heard a distant explosion and realised it was a V-2 rocket hitting somewhere in London. Lilian and Ruth paused for a moment when they heard the faint boom of the explosion and then carried on talking. Lilian remarked when I returned to her bedside: <When are you going to capture the sites where they launch those beastly things?'

I said: <Montgomery is doing his best. I don't think it will be too long.'

<It will be too long if one hits me first,' Lilian commented with a faintly accusing look.

I said to Ruth on the way out, <That's a good sign. She must be feeling better. Presumably, you don't worry about V-2s if you think you're dying.'

As we sat talking on the bus to Hampstead Heath, my certainty increased that I had found a girl with whom I could live for the rest of my life. I gazed raptly at her even profile, her smooth olive-skinned complexion, the small lobes of her ears and her dark lambent eyes as she talked animatedly about her early life in Montreal. I learned that she was completely fluent in French. I told her how, in company with several other newly-graduated pilots, I had once spent a night in her home city. We had asked a taxi driver where we could find some girls and he had answered in French: <Vous êtes trop jeune.'

Ruth said, approvingly. <You must have all looked very young. You still do.'

<I don't feel young any more.' I said, pulling a face.

<Don't worry the best is yet to come. You'll soon find a nice girl and settle down.'

<I'm coming to Canada to find you. I want to lead the applause for the prettiest, most accomplished ballerina of all times.'

Ruth said wryly: <I'll be very lucky if I ever get back into the chorus line. It's so hard once you've been away. By now there are other, more talented girls who have moved far ahead of me.'

<There are none more talented than you,'

<You're just the kind of devoted fan every dancer needs.'

<I don't just love your dancing I love every part of you.'

Ruth wagged an admonitory finger at me.

It was time to get off the bus.

We crossed over by the Leg of Mutton pond. Traffic was being held up as a line of ducklings crossed the road.

We strolled along the paths on the Heath. It was surprisingly warm. The clouds that had been billowing and threatening rain earlier in the day had blown away , leaving small patches of alto-stratus. After we had walked in silence for a while, Ruth said thoughtfully: <Alex, you mustn't consider me as anything other than a friend. I shall never be able to forget Bud. He was the love of my life.'

<I don't expect you to do that. Not at least for a long time. I just want you to know that I shall always be around whenever you want me.'

<Thank you, Alex. I appreciate it.'

Ruth picked up a loose twig and twirled it in her hand and threw it away. <We had a dog at home,' she said inconsequentially. <I wish it were here.'

I said: <I'll be happy to retrieve sticks for you, if in return you'll give me the occasional pat on the head.'

Ruth laughed gaily, grabbed my arm and we walked in step until we came to Kenwood House.

We stopped for a while, admiring the classical lines of the mansion.

I heard Ruth say despondently: <I have so many memories of Bud. But they are all in my head. How can he remember me? There is nowhere to store memories when you're dead?'

I wished at that moment I had the facility to settle her doubts, in the same way as Bud had once consoled the WAAF waitress whose boyfriend had died. All I could say was that Bud had known how to counter that particular argument but I had forgotten exactly how. I added: <He was a great guy. Everyone on the squadron misses him.'

I then told her how my navigator, Denis Coleridge, had felt obliged to try his hand at writing poetry because he shared his name with the great poet.'

Ruth said: <Samuel Coleridge was one of the Lake poets.'

<That's right.' I responded, trying vainly to recall one of his poems.

<The Lake District is supposed to be very beautiful, Ruth said wistfully. I would love to see it before I leave England.'

<Let's go,' I responded, flippantly.

Ruth gave a laugh and replied: <Somehow I think not.'

We went into The Spaniards Inn for a drink. Slightly muzzy from the beer, I ventured: <I feel as if I'm bursting with love for you as you stand ?breast high in the corn."'

Ruth pleaded:<Alex, please don't talk like that.'

<Sorry,' I said meekly.

She took my hand and pleaded: <Friends just friends. Okay.'

I squeezed her hand and said: <I bet the people standing over there by the bar think we're lovers.'

As she looked away, I kissed the palm of her hand. She withdrew it instantly.

<Just playing,' I said, disingenuously. But I had made her very cross. She took her handbag and walked silently out of the pub. I followed her, feeling remorseful. But after a while she forgave me and we ate fish and chips in a nearby restaurant. Afterwards, we went to a cinema and watched a patriotic war film.

As we walked towards a bus stop after leaving the cinema, we heard a sound somewhere between a roar and a whistle. An impulse formed in my mind to put my arm protectively around Ruth. But before I could translate it into action a violent blast of hot air, accompanied by a huge explosion, hurled us violently to the ground. A few hundred yards away a huge column of orange fire and black smoke billowed up fiercely from the centre of a large building. Fissures appeared in the brick walls, as it disintegrated and tumbled to the ground.

There was a series of loud thuds as pieces of debris rained down on the pavement. We stood up shakily. A helmeted ARP warden running towards the scene of the explosion paused to ask us if we needed medical attention. We shook our heads and he ran off in the direction of the explosion. Bells clanged furiously as fire-engines and ambulances arrived on the scene.

On our way home on the bus, we examined each other's blackened faces and dust-covered clothes. I commented: <We were damned lucky to get away with that one.'

Ruth replied in a voice that trembled: <Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to go to the Lake District after all.'

I nodded agreement.

When we arrived back at Lilian Hartman's house, I gave Ruth the Victorian brooch I had bought. She was reluctant to accept it at first, until I pointed out that we had both missed death by inches a puff of wind up aloft might have brought the V-2 closer to us so why let a ridiculous scruple over a mere bauble spoil a happy moment.

Ruth agreed hesitantly, thanked me, praised the brooch and pecked me on the cheek. I could still feel where her lips had touched me when I got into bed. It seemed like a promise of better things to come.

After a furious scramble among hundreds of travellers trying to board a railway carriage at Euston Station, Ruth and I managed to obtain adjoining seats. Ruth had telephoned the hospital and told her aunt of our intention to escape from London for a few days. We had agreed to share all expenses. I had purchased third-class rail tickets. But Ruth, unused to economising, had booked us by telephone into a first-class hotel. I reckoned I had just enough money left to pay my share of the bills.

A dense haze of cigarette smoke filled the carriage and mingled with the sulphurous fumes of burning coal from the locomotive. The rhythmic motion of the train sent Ruth to sleep shortly after we started our journey.

I was travelling in civilian clothes. An Army corporal sitting next to me enquired: <What mob are you in?'

<The RAF.'

<One of the Brylcreem boys. You have a cushy war no I didn't mean that. I've seen one of your lot get shot down in flames. I'd rather stay on the ground at least the medics can get you if you stop one.'

He indicated Ruth's sleeping form with his thumb and said with a wink: <Lucky you, mate,'

<She's a widow lost her husband. He was on my squadron,' I whispered.

He looked grim and said: <I've lost a good few mates. Fucking Germans don't give up easy, do they.'

I agreed and lit the Senior Service cigarette he offered me.

The carriage had emptied by the time we reached Crewe. Ruth, who had by now awakened, produced two oranges. <How did you manage to get hold of these?' I asked, astounded.

<Zingo gave them to me.'

<A Group Captain dealing in the Black Market!' I said caustically.

<They were served as dessert in his club.'

<The Top Brass get everything.'

<Don't you think he deserves it,' Ruth enquired sweetly.

I couldn't resist asking: <Did he ever make a pass at you?'

<He said he would have done if he hadn't already been married.'

<Bloody hypocrite!'

<You're impossible, Alex. You talk a load of crap.'

I was momentarily shocked at her use of the scatological word but remembering that it was one North Americans often use freely, I said: <You're quite right. But I can't help it. I'm just plain jealous.'

<How can you say that!' Ruth said, angrily. <If you carry on like this I shall get off at the next station.'

<Okay. I apologise. I'm really sorry. It's only natural to want something you can't have. Like oranges and bananas.'

Ruth seemed to find this remark funny and exploded with laughter. She said after a while: <Please excuse me. This has been such a ridiculous conversation.'

Her mood suddenly reverting to one of solemnity, she said quietly: <Bud could be very funny at times.'

<He once told me that telling jokes is not the best strategy with women. Was he right?'

Ruth replied, after giving it some thought: <I think if a guy finds the world screamingly funny it's okay. But if he collects jokes deliberately like some people collect stamps it strikes a false note.'

I said humbly: <That joke I told you last night came from a joke book.'

Ruth smiled. <Never mind, Alex. You keep trying. Persistence is a great virtue.'

<Does that mean I might get you to love me eventually?'

<Certainly not,' Ruth said hastily. And added with a smile. <But I'm sure it will work with other girls.'

A long journey is a good test of character. Ruth accepted the frequent halts and endless delays with cheerful fortitude. We were shunted into a siding for two hours, making way for some trains on their way to the southern ports with urgent war material. It was extremely cold. Ruth cuddled up to me, declaring beforehand that only animal warmth was being sought and given. I said, as I shivered not so much with cold as with excitement <Your hair has a lovely smell. It sends tingles down my spine.'

<Don't you ever think of anything but sex, Alex.'

<Isn't that normal? Incidentally, your maid made a sort of pass at me.'

<How old are you, Alex?'

<Twenty-two.'

<You haven't had much experience of sex, have you.'

<Not as much as I would have liked.'

<Sex is not all that important. Monks and nuns manage perfectly well without it. Have you never had a regular girl friend?'

<Only you.'

<Don't be stupid, Alex. Why are you so backwards? Bud had his first experience of sex when he was sixteen?'

<With you?'

<No I didn't know him then. The big event happened in the back of a big Chevrolet.'

<I can't even drive.'

<You mean to say you can fly an aeroplane but you can't drive a car!'

<My father had to sell his car when he went bankrupt.'

<That's rather sad,' Ruth commented, sitting up for a moment before putting her head back onto my shoulder.

I enquired: <Tell me how you first met Bud,'

She told me a long and fascinating story about two young people with very different ideas and missions in life falling in love. By the time her account was finished we had been shunted back on the main line and were chugging our way again up north.

It was two-thirty in the morning by the time we arrived at Windermere railway station, a few miles from the hotel in Grasmere, where Ruth had decided we should stay. A local taxi driver, roused from his bed, drove us to the hotel in his elderly Wolseley car, grumbling all the way at having had his sleep disturbed. <Money isn't everything,' he complained, when I reminded him of the generous fare we had paid. <A man's got a right to a decent night's sleep.'

<You agreed to take us.'

<I've still got a right to complain. That's the only pleasure left now the bleeding war's gone on so long.'

Enjoying his perverse sense of humour, I gave him a generous tip on arrival at our destination.

The Prince of Wales hotel, in spite of it being wartime, still possessed an air of faded elegance. I helped the night porter carry the luggage to our rooms. Ruth's luggage was heavy she had come prepared with magazines, board games and a portable gramophone, in case the weather turned against us.

From my bedroom window I could make out the dark outline of hills. The waters of Lake Grasmere shimmered in the moonlight. This would be a perfect place for a honeymoon, I thought wistfully, as I prepared to go to bed. But I knew I had little to complain of. Against all the odds I

was still alive while others superior to me in every way had died. No doubt the instructor back in Canada with a macabre sense of humour had by now drawn a halo over Bud's head in the group photograph. I was still troubled because I had failed to respond quickly to Denis's report that he had seen a dinghy. I lay awake for much of the night, wondering whether prompt action on my part might have saved Bud's or indeed someone else's life.

The following morning, Ruth came down looking svelte in a figure-hugging green woollen jumper and red trousers. Tempting cooking smells were issuing from the kitchen. We breakfasted on lavish portions of smoked haddock and poached eggs. Afterwards, we went into the village and bought a map. Foiled through a lack of clothing coupons in our plan to buy walking boots, we decided to walk to Windermere in the afternoon on the highway. We would dine there and return to Grasmere by bus or taxi.

But first we visited Dove Cottage, once the home of William Wordsworth. As we stood outside, Ruth mentioned the poet's friendship with Samuel Coleridge. I reminded her it was the coincidence that my navigator shared his name with the poet that had brought us here. <You're forgetting something else,' Ruth said sombrely, <We're here because the V-2 narrowly missed us.'

* * *

We lunched off grilled lamb chops and peas followed by an excellent trifle and drank some of the local beer. <Meat,'I remarked, <is more plentiful here than in London.'

I said to Ruth during the meal: <You are Canadian-French-Jewish-North American that's a pretty good combination.'

<Don't forget Hungarian both my parents came from Budapest.'

<Where did Bud's parents come from?'

<They were born in Canada. His grandparents came from Russia.'

I told her the origin of my family name and how I had been called Toothpaste at school. By the time we had changed into our walking clothes and set off for Windermere it was quite late. After a couple of miles, I suggested that since the ground was reasonably dry we should try the cross-country route. Ruth accepted the challenge and started galloping up a fern-covered slope. I had difficulty in keeping up with her. The fresh air and exercise had brought colour to her cheeks. Soon, we settled down to a steady walking pace. During our journey I identified a number of wild flowers I recognised from walks taken over the Sussex Downs.

An aircraft flew overhead in a clear blue sky. Ruth said: <Look, there's a Beaufighter.'

<It's a Mosquito.'

<How do you tell the difference?'

<The shape of the wings, the shape of the engines it's very different. I would like to fly one. They're made of wood they're faster than the Beaufighter.'

<They all look the same to me.'

<Ballet dancers don't need to know about aeroplanes. Incidentally, I have never been to a ballet'

Ruth suddenly performed a series of graceful movements and continued to dance by herself for the next ten minutes, making up the steps as she went along. She seemed to be able to express every possible emotion through her body. I could see dryads, sylphs, haughty duchesses, meek serving girls even a beggar woman lurching from side to side as she pushed a rubbish-laden pram.

<I would have paid good money to see you do that on stage,' I told her enthusiastically.

<I was just testing myself. I've become so sloppy I feel I shall never achieve a proper performance standard.'

<Of course you will!'

She shook her head again, despondently. The lake seemed to shrink in size as we continued our climb and darkened once the sun began to sink behind the hills. I then made a tactless gaffe. Pointing to some white birds flying in ragged formation over the water, I commented: <I envy birds their flying skills. They would never fly straight into the water, which is exactly what I saw somebody do once.'

Ruth didn't answer. Instead, she clutched my arm very tightly. Tears began forming in her eyes. I put my arm around her and cursing myself for my stupidity, said: <Let's go down the slope and find somewhere to have tea.'

It was almost dark by the time we reached the road. We thumbed a lift from a Vauxhall car adapted to run on methane gas with a huge mattress-like gas tank on its roof. It was pulling a trailer. I enquired if the system worked well. The driver said he didn't think it was doing his engine valves much good but it had enabled him to continue with his fertilizer business.

We dined at a hotel in Windermere. Studying the menu, I did a swift calculation in my head and worked out that my funds would be completely exhausted by the time we returned from our holiday. Not that it worried me because my journey to North Camber from London would be taken care of by a first-class railway warrant supplied by the Royal Air Force.

Ruth suddenly said: <You may be interested to know that Stella, my aunt's maid, is having an affair with a married Special Policeman.'

<How do you know?'

<I caught them in bed while my aunt was out.'

<What did you do?'

<I suggested they find somewhere else for their love-making in future.'

<He's a lucky policeman.'

<She's a silly girl.'

<I saw her standing naked in the bathroom. She left the door open.'

<My, oh, my! She was after you as well. Why didn't you go for it.'

<It would have been a disgusting abuse of hospitality. Anyway, I'm in love with someone else.'

<Who? Oh don't tell me! Really, Alex, you must try to be more down-to-earth and practical. You shouldn't think of me in those terms.'

Ruth lit a cigarette and looked very cross.

<I can't help it. Would you have liked me to accept Stella's invitation?'

<Sure. Getting laid would have improved you. You wouldn't be making sheep's eyes at me all the time!'

I felt encouraged by her candid comment.

We discussed her prospects of joining a dance company. She rejected outright the suggestion I made that she should teach ballet. Performing was all she wanted to do.

Asked what I proposed to do after the war, I replied, uncomfortably: <I've no idea. There's no point in making plans until the war is over.'

<You must make positive plans. Try to be optimistic, Alex.'

<It's hard to be optimistic, knowing that you're soon going back to Canada.'

<We have three whole days yet.'

<Do you have to go back?'

<Of course.'

<I suppose there's nothing to keep you here. I don't count for much.'

<Oh, but you do, Alex. I do like you. But you'll soon find someone else when I'm gone.'

I shook my head gloomily and said: <I don't know how to handle women.'

<You'll soon learn. It's just that you lack confidence.' She sipped more wine and said absently: <You know, you men attach far too much importance to your sexual prowess. Sex is no big deal.'

<Isn't it?'

Ruth grimaced wryly and said: <I can tell from your expression that what I've just said won't make a cent's worth of difference.'

<How do you know?'

<By your attitude. You eye every woman up and down as though you had never seen one before.' She paused, looked at me intently and went on: <Incidentally, just get it into your head that it would be absolutely disastrous for us to go to bed wrong for me, wrong for both of us.'

I said hastily: <I don't think of you that way... Well, I suppose I do. I just can't help hoping that one of these days you'll marry me. '

Ruth then placed her hand on top of mine and said gently: <Alex, I knew a boy just like you when I was at High School. He was very callow. You sound just like him. It was probably a mistake to come here with you... Still now we're here, we might just as well make the best of it.'

Feeling crestfallen, I summoned a waitress and asked what was for dessert.

<It's Lord Woolton's rhubarb pudding today.'

<Lord Woolton?' Ruth enquired.

<The Minister for Food,' I explained. <Thank you that'll do,' I said to the waitress. And as she walked away, I commented to Ruth: <It's daft, isn't it, calling a pudding after a member of the War Cabinet. Let's pretend the war doesn't exist. Incidentally, why did you come to England when you didn't have to?'

<Because I wanted to be with Bud. I knew he was just a little bit crazy and needed someone to look after him. I was quite surprised when he got through his initial military training without any trouble, because he was the sort of person who would start telling the NCO's how to do their job. He was irrepressible, always bursting with ideas.'

I said with a smile: <So I noticed. But I shall always remember him as being very good-hearted and considerate. He was also an excellent pilot. Everybody he came across liked him. If he was mad it was in the nicest possible way.'

<Yes,' Ruth said forlornly: < I knew that the terrible streak of single-mindedness he had would kill him in the end.'

<What did his friends think of him?'

<They often used to make fun of him. There was a professor at Harvard who once commented: ?If there is anybody in the world who would have the nerve to tell God there was a serious flaw in his natural laws, I guess it's Chaim Fischer" Bud, by the way, was only his nickname.'

<I didn't realise that.'

<The same professor also said once: <Chaim will have no life if he fails his math test. He was making a pun on Chaim, which as you know, means Life in Hebrew.'

<And did he fail?'

<No he was a brilliant student. It was shortly after that that he decided to enlist in the Royal Air Force. '

<Was the professor picking on him'

<In the nicest possible way. I think he recognised Bud's unusual talents.'

<I can see you've had a lot to put up with.'

Ruth shook her head.

<I didn't mind. We're all odd in some way. But you don't really know anybody until you have lived with them. I suppose General de Gale's wife thought he was quite mad until he marched triumphantly into Paris at the head of his troops.'

<This is nice rhubarb pudding.'

<Probably out of a tin.'

At that moment Bud's bizarre notion about the Cartoonist and Popeye flashed through my mind.

I said: <Splat!'

Ruth gave me a startled look.

<It's all right. I just had a funny thought. We had better skip coffee, if we're going to make the last bus.'

The aircraft shuddered in severe turbulence. I was flying through a storm so violent that clouds of dust kept floating up from the cockpit floor, completely obscuring the flight instruments. Hailstones rattled furiously against the fuselage. Suddenly, the storm subsided. Everything became eerily silent. Then a brilliant flash of lightning ignited the fuel tanks. I bailed out and descended through white opaque clouds, eventually coming to a gentle rest in a hotel corridor, on opposite sides of which stood Stella and Ruth, posing alluringly in diaphanous nightgowns.

The dream, I decided as I shaved, was telling me that it was thoroughly wicked to lust after two girls at the same time.

Ruth was waiting for me in the dining-room. She suggested as we tackled a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs I could tell they were real eggs and not dried a visit to Lake Coniston, where Sir Malcolm Campbell broke the world's water speed record. Afterwards, we planned to visit John Ruskin's house at Brantwood. <He was a distinguished nineteenth-century art professor,' Ruth explained, answering my puzzled look. I expressed my heartfelt willingness to accompany her wherever she wished to go in search of culture.

The newspaper headlines suggested that Germany would surrender the following year. But an editorial warned that the British people must be prepared for a long war with the Japanese. Nevertheless it seemed a good idea to ask Ruth about job opportunities in Canada. Perhaps her answer would provide some kind of clue as to her feelings for me.

While we were waiting for the bus to Coniston, I asked if Bud ever faltered in his belief.

Ruth thought for a while and then replied: <No, I don't think so. He once said life would be worthless if you didn't believe. His faith gave him tremendous confidence.'

It occurred to me at that moment that Bud might have suffered from over-confidence, a deadly sin in a pilot. But I suppressed the thought and commented: <It can't have been easy living with someone like that. You'd better marry a non-believer like me next time.'

<Thank you, Alex,' Ruth replied demurely. <I shall never remarry but if that was a proposal I feel greatly honoured.'

A bull-nosed, elderly vehicle was clattering towards us. I called out: <Here's the bus.'

I paid both fares and Ruth immediately complained that I was breaking our agreement to share all expenses.

<It's not worth arguing about.'

<We must do as we agreed.'

<It doesn't matter this time.'

<No, here's the money take it.'

I mulishly refused.

Ruth muttered: <Then we'll adjust it later.'

It seemed ridiculous to argue over such a trivial matter. We didn't speak until the blue waters of Lake Coniston came into view. Ruth then said in a low voice: <You said something yesterday about someone flying into the sea. Do you think that might have happened to Bud?'

<Most unlikely.'

<What do you think happened?'

<It's impossible to guess.'

<Sorry, Alex. But I can't get it out of my mind.'

<You'll get over it one day and then you'll be free to get on with your own life again.'

<You're very good, Alex.' Ruth said, putting her hand on my arm. < I've noticed a change in you since we first met. You've become more mature.'

<Thanks. And you have remained exactly the same charming person that I first met in Albertstown.'

<What was your first impression?'

<I thought what a lucky man Bud was to have such a beautiful, bouncy young wife.'

<Bouncy? That sounds like a beach ball.'

<No, I meant resilient, buoyant, full of life. More like a tennis ball.'

<I hope I'm not as round as a tennis ball.'

<I particularly like the parts of you that are very round.'

Ruth shot a reproving glance at me and asked: <What's that hill over there? I must look it up.'

As she examined the map, low cloud drifted over the peak, hiding it from view.

We left the bus at a stop near a small wooden shack advertising teas and began walking round the lake in the direction of Ruskin's house. We discussed the native flora and admired the rich display of rhododendrons and honeysuckle. At that point I had to admit that my limited knowledge had run out.

<Never mind,' Ruth said sweetly. <I shall have to test you out on other things.'

<Ornithology, perhaps,' I said, tongue-in-cheek. <That's a duck over there.'

<Ah, but what kind of a duck? Ruth enquired, looking up at me gravely. <There are a number of sub-species.'

<A duck is a duck is a duck. I should know I have scored plenty at cricket.'

My joke was completely wasted, because Ruth had never heard of this cricketing term. But she knew a great deal about the professor whose house we were on our way to visit. She informed me that his marriage had been a failure.

<What happened?'

<It was nullified. Apparently, he couldn't do what a husband is supposed to do.'

<Terrible,' I muttered.

<I'm sure it won't happen to you.'

<How can you be so sure?'

Ruth gave an amused smile but didn't answer.

We were passing through a small lakeside wood. The sun shone on soft mossy ground sprinkled with loose leaves and twigs. After a while, in the fresh air and pleasant surroundings Ruth seemed to regain her spirits.

<How about a little dance,' I urged, pushing at her shoulder playfully.

In a moment she was transformed into a sprightly, alert dryad. Just as suddenly she resumed her former posture and continued to tramp alongside me.

<Wonderful!,' I said enthusiastically. I've become an ardent ballet fan.'

<I might be able to get some tickets from Lilian for you some time. I rang her this morning and she's making remarkable progress.'

<I'm very glad to hear it. She didn't mind us deserting her.'

<Not in the least. She encouraged me to get away. She has been here herself and said it has a remarkable atmosphere.'

<Do you agree?'

<Certainly. No wonder Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey loved it here.'

Imitating the Devonshire accent Coleridge was reputed to have had, I quoted a little poem our schoolmaster had composed about him.

I'm just an ancient Mariner,

Sam Coleridge is my name.

I smoke a little opium.

That's how I won my fame.

And with my friend de Quincey

And other poets true,

I have hallucinations

And write a verse or two.

I wander lonely as the clouds

O'er field and lake and sea.

But though the clouds float in the sky,

They b'ain't as high as me.

Ruth rewarded me with a smile and said: <Yes, they all seemed to experiment with drugs in those days. The Ancient Mariner positively reeks of opium.'

We emerged from the wood and came again to the lake shore. Tiny circles appeared in the shining waters as it began to rain.

I said: <I suppose it's possible to experience this sense of the supernatural without actually taking drugs?'

Ruth said quickly: <Bud sometimes seemed to.'

<He always seemed very practical and down-to-earth to me.'

<That was only on the surface. He had a profound sense of something beautiful existing outside what we call Reality.

He said once that sometimes when he was flying he felt tuned in to eternity.'

Again a doubt arose in my mind about Bud's piloting ability. Perhaps he had undergone some kind of mystical experience when he should have been concentrating on his flight instruments. Naturally, I made no comment.

The rain became heavier. I suggested that we take shelter under the trees.

By the time we had done so the lake was obscured by low cloud and driving rain. We stood close together under the low branches, water dripping onto our heads. A pleasant fragrance floated up to me from Ruth's dark brown hair. She looked very pensive.

<What are you thinking of?' I enquired.

<I was thinking that it isn't fair of me to keep talking about Bud.'

<I don't mind in the least. He was a very good friend.'

Ruth said in a husky voice: <Just now I saw him very clearly, standing in a familiar pose with his arms folded in front of him. He seemed rather amused at our being together. Perhaps I'm going mad.'

<You miss him so much it's only natural. As long as you realise that it was just an illusion. You saw Bud because you wanted to see him.'

<No, I don't think so. It's the other way around he wanted to see me. For a long time I have had a feeling that he would come to say goodbye.'

Ruth began to cry inconsolably. I put my arm round her and tried to comfort her. I wiped the rain and tears from her face with my handkerchief, thinking how stupid I had been to think that I could ever play any part in her life.

A sudden clap of thunder announced another deluge of rain against which the trees offered insufficient protection. I moved closer to her to protect her from the rain filtering steadily through the leaves.

Clearing my throat, I enquired: <Are you all right?'

<Just a little damp.' She gave a nervous laugh.

<A pity we didn't bring the right clothes.'

After a quarter of an hour the rain eased a little. But suddenly I bent down awkwardly and kissed her lips.

<Why did you do that?' she asked with astonishment.

<Just to let you know that someone cares.'

She frowned, disapprovingly.

The rain continued to fall.

I said: <Did you approve of Bud's ambition to become a rabbi?'

<Of course I approved. He had this wonderful gift of inspiring belief in other people.'

But not in me, I thought, sombrely.

Soon, the clouds dispersed. The rain stopped and a rainbow appeared at the far end of the lake.

I said <Let's go.'

Ruth remained standing, fascinated by the rainbow.

<Come on,' I said impatiently.

As we scrambled up the slope leading towards the road which led to Brantwood House, Ruth said breathlessly: <Bud always used to say a prayer whenever he saw a rainbow.'

In no mood for listening to further recollections of Bud Fischer and feeling cold and hungry, I tried to hurry her along.

Shortly afterwards we saw a bus making its way in the opposite direction from Brantwood and made a decision to forsake Professor John Ruskin in favour of the food and comfort in our hotel.

The elderly head-waiter was standing by the reception desk when we arrived back at the hotel. Inclining his balding head towards us respectfully, he announced gravely that lunch was finished. And then, gazing intently at Ruth, obviously under the spell of her beauty, he relented and announced that Spam salad might possibly be made available.

Ruth smiled and answered <That'll be fine.'

We changed into dry clothes before coming down to the dining-room. Dense clouds gathering overhead had turned day into night. I asked the waitress to switch on the dining-room lights, which allowed us to inspect a few meagre slices of some pink substance on the plates she had placed before us. Ruth commented doubtfully as she began to eat: <They says it's nutritious.' She was right. Eaten with liberal quantities of lettuce, tomatoes, mustard and several slices of brown bread, it allayed our hunger.

Climbing the stairs as we made our way back to our rooms, I said, <It looks as though we'll have to stay in for the rest of the day.'

<You can come in for a game of chess, if you like.'

As she placed red and white carved ivory chess pieces on a board, I commented: <That's a beautiful set.'

<Bud bought it in Boston. He taught me to play.'

<Who used to win?'

<He always did he was invincible. He sometimes used to beat me blindfold. It made me furious!'

<You'll have no difficulty in disposing of me,'

As it happened, I won easily. Replacing the pieces in a box, I said: <I don't think your heart's in the game.'

<It's not in anything much these days.'

<You'll bounce back. Life is just a game of chess'. I quoted Omar Khayyam:

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:'

I didn't realised I had made a gaffe until she completed the quotation:

<Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.'

Observing my distraught expression because of its allusion to death, Ruth said: <It's all right don't worry. Bud never did go much on Omar Khayyam, anyway. He said he had a negative attitude towards life.'

<But Omar did recommend filling the cup. I'll ring down for some wine.'

Ruth gave a noncommittal shrug. Nevertheless, I telephoned Room Service. As we waited for the wine, I went over to the window and gazed out at Grasmere Lake which was intermittently illuminated by lightning. It was still raining heavily.

I returned to my chair and commented cheerfully: <Still, this is better than dodging V-1's and V-2's in London.'

<Why didn't you go to Hartington to see your family? It's safe enough down there.'

<I wanted to be with you.'

<That wasn't a very sensible idea.'

A waitress appeared with wine and glasses. I poured some wine and gave the Hebrew toast: <L'chayim,'

Ruth responded <L'chayim and shalom.' To life and peace. She mused sadly: <Bud and I had plenty of toasts like that at our wedding. Instead, all we got was war and death.'

<Things'll improve from now on. Drink up.'

Setting the example, I downed my glass. Ruth sipped her wine. After a while, she remarked wistfully: <I realise now that when I thought I could see Bud this morning it was just an illusion.'

<He was always very keen on the notion that we see what we want to see. In that sense you could say it was real.'

Ruth shook her head and said: <No, I have been playing a wishing game. He is dead and I must get used to it. He used to say we can see the world either as a dried-up orange or as a lush green planet full of marvellous creatures. You are right when you quote him as saying we choose what we want to see. But he wasn't a dreamer. He was the first to admit that we have to accept what life has in store for us.'

<Some people obviously see life as being very transitory. I can't help marvelling at the courage of those Japanese kamikaze pilot who fly straight into American ships.'

I refilled Ruth's glass. Noticing that she was frowning, I said: <If you don't like the wine, I can order something else.'

<It's all right. I'm just trying to remember something Bud once said to me. It was very poetic.'

<He had a great way of putting things. And he did his best to make people around him happy.'

Painfully aware of the inadequacy of my attempts to console her, I phoned down for another bottle of wine.

<Cheers! Shalom!' I said, when it had arrived.

Ruth said despondently: <I'm sure Hitler has still got some more nasty tricks up his sleeve.'

<No. The war will soon be over, I'll come to Canada when I'm demobbed. Do you think I shall be able to find a job?'

<It's a big country with a great future.'

<Promise that you won't run away to somewhere else.'

<I intend to join a ballet company. It might be anywhere.'

<Wherever it is I'll come down and see you perform.'

Ruth's face brightened a little

<It would be lovely to dance again in front of an audience.'

<Dance for me now.' My eye had lighted on the portable gramophone resting on the chest-of-drawers.

Ruth shook her head.

I said: <I suppose you'd rather talk about Bud.'

Perhaps sensing a slight resentment in my tone, Ruth replied: <No, this time let's talk about you.' After a pause, she continued: <Bud always thought you were a rather shy person.'

<There, you have to bring Bud into it even when the conversation is supposed to be about me.'

Obviously conscience-stricken, Ruth said: <Please don't get upset. It's terrible of me. But I just can't help it.'

<And I'm as bad. I can't help hoping that one day I shall replace him in your life.'

<No one will ever do that. But I'm glad to be here with you.'

<Thanks. Let's drink to us and a speedy end to the war.'

As I poured out more wine, Ruth stretched her arms lazily, outlining her breasts against the flimsy material of her shirt. Handing the glass to her, I said: <I have a confession to make. I used to dream about kissing you, even when Bud was still alive. It was wicked of me. I just couldn't help it.'

Ruth spilled a little wine on her shirt, wiped it off absently with her hand and remarked: <You're terribly gauche, Alex. I really shouldn't have come away with you.'

<I'm sorry, I promise not to say anything like that again.'

<It's all right. Bud said you had problems. It's an indictment of society that young men are considered old enough to die but too young to have sex.'

<Some chaps manage all right.'

<Never mind, Alex. Let's have a dance,'

Her speech seemed a little slurred. But she wound up the gramophone with a surprising vigour and put on a Glen Miller record. We swayed together to the music for a while between the bed and the chest-of-drawers. Suddenly, she pushed me away and and collapsed on the bed.

<Are you all right?' I enquired.

<Just tired. I think I'll have a rest. Please, Alex, go back to your room.'

<Are you sure you're okay?' I asked.

<I'll be all right when I've had a rest. You can come back in half an hour.'

I lifted the needle from the record, switched off the gramophone and went to my room.

I lay in a warm bath, thinking sadly that Bud still totally dominated Ruth's thoughts and this would obviously be the case for for a long time to come. If it seemed wicked and heartless for me to entertain hopes of taking his place so soon after his death, it was because a different set of rules applied in war-time. Death was never far away we had come within seconds of being blown to pieces by a V-2 in London. But even though I had so far not received any encouragement, I was sure that the experiences Ruth and I had shared would work in my favour. I had little doubt that I would join Ruth in Canada when the war was over. Bud's ghost would eventually fade, which is what he would have wished.

I stepped out of the bath, dried myself and put on grey flannel trousers and a Harris tweed sports jacket. After carefully combing my hair I knocked on the adjoining door. Ruth was wearing a white satin dressing-robe as she opened it. I apologised and said I would come back later.

<It's okay. I'm sure you've seen plenty of girls in the movies entertaining their menfolk dressed like this.'

I lowered myself into a small, chintz-covered armchair and said: <Okay. I'll pretend you're Merle Oberon.'

Ruth sat down facing the dressing-table mirror.

<In that case,' Ruth said, smoothing her eyebrows, <Who will you be?'

<Donald Duck.'

Ruth smiled into the mirror and said: <I'm sure you can do better than that.'

<Okay. Cary Grant. Shall we do the love scene now?'

<You're the one who's writing the script.'

I coughed first and then intoned in a fair imitation of his voice: <The bemedalled war hero says to the beautiful widow: ?My dear, I have never seen anyone less suited to widow's weeds. Don't you think the time has come to let the world enjoy your beauty once again."'

<That's rather corny.'

She walked over to the bed, bent down and said absently, as she put on slippers that matched her robe,<Now what am I supposed to say?'

<How about: <Yes, you are right, my darling. Already I feel a dawning attraction towards you.'

<It won't do I<m afraid.'

<Sorry. That was a bit stupid.'

<You were doing all right up till then.'

<Really?'

<You'll have to try harder.'

Ruth returned to the dressing-table and began to brush her hair. She said after a while: I can tell from your script that you are an old-fashioned romantic.'

<I suppose I am.'

I had noticed in the mirror the delectable hollow between her breasts and gave an embarrassed cough.

<What's the matter?' Ruth demanded.

<Nothing.'

Ruth pulled her dressing-robe around her with her free hand and said reprovingly: <I can see exactly what Bud meant. You are just terribly immature.'

<I'm sorry. I don't doubt Bud could have played Cary Grant without any trouble at all.'

Ruth replied bitterly: <Bud was a great guy. But do you know he lacked the most important quality of all the gift of survival.'

<He was just unlucky.'

Ruth's shoulders drooped.

She said after a pause: <I suppose I shouldn't have said that. But there was always a reckless quality about him.' She went on, frowning as she spoke, <I think he had a premonition that he would die young. He once said: ?Mozart composed sublime music for thirty-odd years and shut up when he had said all he had to say. When I've said what I have to say, I'll go cheerfully."'

She continued brushing her hair with slow, languorous strokes.

<Mozart at least left his music behind him.'

<Bud also left something behind his thoughts and ideas. I have his papers.'

<Of course. I forgot. You're going to do something with them when you return to Montreal.'

<I'm convinced that if he had lived Bud would have become a great man. Some people, mind you, thought that he was a little wacky. The Royal Canadian Air Force gave him a psychological test and decided that he was very slightly unbalanced. Which was why he joined the Royal Air Force. One of the reasons I came to England was that I convinced myself that while I was around he wouldn't do anything foolish. Do you think he did something recklessly brave on the night that he died?'

<He probably did. But unfortunately no one will ever know. He was certainly an amazing character.'

Ruth then turned round and said, smiling wistfully: <His barmitzvah was a howl. He gave an impromptu commentary on the text which outraged the rabbi. The congregation loved it. He was certainly an original.'

<If he had lived, he might have done a lot of good in this world.'

Ruth interrupted, saying eagerly: <Yes, that is exactly what I think.' Her robe had parted again. I couldn't resist saying <Phew! Ruth, you're so damned beautiful!'

She pulled the robe round her again, then impulsively pulled me towards her, buried my head between her breasts and murmured:<Oh, Alex, What on earth am I going to do with you!'

I pulled the robe off her shoulders and kissed her breasts. She shook her head slowly with a frightened expression. I gazed up at her yearningly and then, like a drowning man, hugged her with all my strength.

Ruth muttered something and undid my tie. I struggled clumsily out of my clothing. We fell on the bed in a wild, limb-tangling embrace, a torrent bursting forth from my loins, my heart bursting with gratitude.

Ruth commented soon afterwards, smiling indulgently: <The fastest gun in the West.'

I stammered: <I'm sorry'

Ruth said: <Don't worry. She got up, wound up the gramophone and put on a record of a symphony. The opening bars were broadcast by the BBC, to give courage to the people in Occupied Europe. Lying beside me on the bed, as the sound wafted over me, she asked, <Do you recognise the music?'

<V for Victory it's the music the BBC plays before they broadcast to Europe.'

<That's right.' Ruth then knelt over me and whispered: <Concentrate on the music.' I stroked her face, her shoulders, her hair her breasts. She placed my hand between her thighs. Her eyelids closed. I thought she was asleep, as we lay quietly for a while, listening to the rolling cadences of the music. Then we joined and rode together triumphantly to the majestic rhythm of Beethoven's Fifth symphony, achieving a mystical and blissful union, as the compelling rhythm of the music brought us to a prolonged ecstatic climax. Ruth's face went slack and with her head held back, she gave vent to a series of helpless shrieks. Her lithe body continued to quiver and pulsate until, eventually, she lay silent and content in my arms. At that moment I felt immortal. The Walls of Death that had encompassed me for so long collapsed like the Walls of Jericho.

The music stopped.

We slept for a while. When I awoke, Ruth was idly playing with the hairs on my chest, her face looking relaxed. There was a faint dew of perspiration on her forehead. I kissed her gently and remarked: <I feel like a king.'

<You have behaved like one,' she remarked, approvingly. <Did you like the music?'

<It's sublime. But you have given me a problem. I shall want to make love to you every time I listen to Overseas broadcasts.'

She bent down and bit the lobe of my ear.

I gasped.

Ruth laughed and said: <I'm afraid I won't be available.'

<Will you marry me?' I pleaded.

<Don't spoil it. We'll discuss it some other time.'

<I must know. I must know. I must know.

<Darling Alex,' Ruth said in the manner of a schoolmistress: <Just because you have experienced sexual pleasure, don't let yourself be fooled into believing that the world is a romantic place.'

She continued, in a trance-like voice: <That was my special gift to you. From now on you'll have to manage without me,'

<Do you have to go back to Canada?'

<Yes. I've told you I'm going to rejoin a dance company.'

<Couldn't you join an English company?'

<You've forgotten. There's something else I have to do as well. I am going to set up a foundation in Bud's memory.'

I pulled a face.

<Don't look like that!' Ruth commanded.

<Sorry. But I just can't help being jealous.'

<Be thankful that you are alive.'

I said: <Oh, God, I would give anything to bring Bud back again. I can't express how grateful I am for your kindness. I am reborn. I shall never love anybody as much as I love you. Please marry me.'

<Alex, people don't marry just because they've had sexual intercourse. If they did, Bud and I would have married different partners long before we met.'

<I wanted to marry you from the first time we met.'

<Only because there were no other women available. But I'm very flattered.'

She bent down and kissed me.

<Ruth, will you come down to Hartington some time and meet my parents?'

<No. It might give everybody, including you, darling Alex, the wrong idea.'

<Checkmate,' I said grumpily.

<Wind up the gramophone.'

<What?'

<Wind it up.' Ruth commanded in an authoritative tone.

Once again I became a willing slave to the music.

I whispered into her ear as I left her room at five o'clock in the morning: <As well as V For Victory, those opening bars will always spell out the words: ?I love you."'

Having spent practically every penny I possessed during my leave, I was unable to buy food or cigarettes during the long journey back from London to North Camber. But I didn't mind. Proven in love as well as in war, I now truly felt like an <aristocrat'. And even though I vaguely recognised that Ruth had only given herself to me out of a kind of despairing kindness, I felt that nevertheless I had made important progress in my campaign to persuade her to marry her.

In order to obtain funds to pay my mess bill that month, I pawned the watch I had bought in Canada.

We continued to hunt for enemy shipping off the Belgian, Dutch and German coasts. Every time I flew I thought about the supposed dinghy sighting and even though I knew I had responded in a reasonable way to Denis's suggestion that he had glimpsed something in the sea, I felt badly about it.

I asked another pilot what he would have done in similar circumstances. He seemed to think I was mad even to ask the question. But he did point out that if a strike on enemy ships had been made before I caught up with the formation, I might have faced a court-martial. For some reason this eased my sense of guilt.

I paid a visit to Hartington the next time I had leave my parents had complained about not seeing me and called on Ruth on my way back through London. Mrs Hartman, although very gaunt, remained bright-eyed and enthusiastic about the various cultural events she was sponsoring.

Stella had absconded with her Special Policeman, leaving the big house servantless. Mrs. Hartman expressed her belief that the V-2s were arriving less frequently, adding hopefully that perhaps they were being aimed at another part of London. Her sense of temporary immunity was, of course, an illusion because V-2's fall entirely randomly within the London area at which they are being aimed.

After she had departed in a taxi to attend one of her committee meetings, Ruth seemed cold and distant. I guessed she was thinking about Bud again. She offered me a cup of coffee. I declined, took both her hands in mine and said: <Have you forgotten what happened between us?'

She replied her face expressionless: <Did it mean so much to you?'

<It was a transfiguring experience.'

<It was only sex.'

<ONLY! It was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I shall never want to do it again with anyone else ever.'

She smiled faintly.

<I'm glad, Alex. But you'll soon forget me when I am thousands of miles away in Canada.'

<No I won't,' I said emphatically. <Your image will be with me all the time until I get demobbed and come to get you.'

She released my hands. But I hugged her and pleaded: <Let's go to bed. This may be our last opportunity for years.'

Ruth thought for a moment, her face expressionless, then led me upstairs to her bedroom.

She seemed amused as I undressed in unseemly haste.

I put my arms around her and whispered: <Beethoven's Fifth'. But she shook her head, and put on instead a record of Marlene Dietrich singing Lilli Marlene. I said as she joined me on the bed, <I feel guilty making love to German music.'

<Beethoven was German, too.'

<Have you forgotten that <Dit dit dit dah means I love you in all languages.'

Afterwards, I complained: <I don't think you enjoyed it.'

<Do you think I just did it to please you?'

<To help the war effort perhaps.'

<I am not that patriotic.'

<Were you thinking about Bud?'

<Darling, Alex, what a silly question. I'm always thinking about Bud. But I'm very fond of you. You're a very nice lover. But it is impossible to plan a future together as things are.'

<I shall come over to see you in Canada when I'm demobbed. Until then I'll flood you with air letters.'

<I shall enjoy reading them.'

<Will you reply?'

<Of course.'

<Promise.'

<I promise faithfully.'

<I do love you so. You are utterly without flaws. I'm completely enraptured with you.'

<Calf love.'

<That's not true we're both the same age.'

<In some ways, especially emotionally, you are a lot younger. Almost a baby.'

<Did you make love out of pity?'

<Silly boy! I wouldn't have done it if I didn't find you very attractive.'

<But not attractive enough to marry.'

<I may marry you one day. But for the moment Bud is still telling me what to do.'

<What is he telling you to do at this moment?'

Ruth gave a wistful smile.

<He is telling me to dance.'

She jumped off the bed, changed the record on the gramophone and swayed and gyrated to Stravinsky's Ritual Fire Dance, completely lost in the music, communicating with some Higher Reality. There was a strange, other-worldliness about it that removed all sexual connotations. Holy men in some religions express their feelings in bodily movements, which corresponded exactly to what Ruth was doing.

The music ceased and the gramophone began its empty whirring. Ruth came over to the bed, cradled my head in her arms and said: <Did you like it?'

<It was magnificent.'

We made love again.

I travelled back to North Camber from Liverpool Street. The railway carriage smelled of ingrained grime and tobacco. I felt jealous when the thought occurred to me that Ruth must have danced for Bud in a similar fashion. I was an intruder. He would always be there before me. Then I remembered that he was dead and I was alive and felt thoroughly ashamed. I could look forward to receiving the letters she had promised to write from Canada and would travel to see her there as soon as the war was over.

I received a postcard a few days later informing me that she would soon be sailing the exact date, of course, was a war-time secret. Mixed with sadness at her going was a feeling of profound gratitude. Ruth, by her kindness, more than any other person in the world, had encouraged me to believe in that Other World that Bud was so sure existed. Once, showing me his crumpled picture of the chalice, he had said: <Buddy-boy Heaven is also in the mind. If you want to see it, it's there for you to see.'

PART TWO

Charlie's story continues in 1995

My father's notebooks end abruptly at this point.

After inspecting numerous postcard advertisements in newsagents's windows, I managed to find a room on the third floor of a lodging house in Kilburn, north-west London. Its furnishings consist of a single divan bed, a rickety card-table covered with torn and faded green baize and two badly stained fireside chairs one of which has a loose spring which still, occasionally, after several weeks, catches me by surprise and nips my bottom. The dirty double-ring cooker, cracked porcelain sink and minute rusty fridge are discreetly hidden behind a beaded curtain. I share a bathroom with a dozen other tenants who are invariably using it when I need to pee or crap.

I sometimes console myself with the thought that my paternal great-grandparents, penniless refugees from Russia, would have considered my present accommodation luxurious. Oddly, as the result of an advantageous deal with a travel agent Helen and I spent our honeymoon in Israel. She is very good at spotting travel bargains, in fact any kind of bargains.

We met for the first time when she quoted for some art work I needed in a hurry she has her own graphics company. Early on in our relationship I happened to mention that my father was Jewish, emphasizing the fact that I am not. I therefore had reason to feel annoyed when she said in

reference to our honeymoon that I would be <going back to my roots.' I reminded her of the Duke of Wellington, who when someone insisted that he must be Irish because he was born in Ireland, replied: <Just because someone is born in a stable doesn't make him a horse.' Helen, who has an Irish background, commented: <That was a very insulting remark. But I wasn't insulting Jews when I said that you are going back to your roots.' <To be Jewish,' I explained patiently, <requires one to have a Jewish mother. My mother isn't Jewish; ergo I am not a Jew.' Then I abruptly changed the subject, because the last thing I wanted was to get into an argument.

Irritatingly, another incident occurred which emphasized her obtuseness in these matters. Helen always carries a sketch book around with her. While we were in Jerusalem she took out her pencil and began to draw a small synagogue. A little man wearing an embroidered skullcap came out, blinking in the sunlight and invited me to go inside. He asked me to make up a minyan the minimum number of ten males required for a Jewish religious service. I declined politely, saying <I'm not Jewish,' adding lamely, <As a matter of fact I'm on my honeymoon.'

He didn't appear to understand and again urged me to come inside, saying in heavily accented English: <It will be another blessing on your marriage.'

Helen said: <Go on, Charles. It'll give me time to finish my sketch.'

I declined and hurried Helen away. Later, when we were unpacking back at our home in London, Helen coming across the unfinished sketch, said reproachfully: <If you had gone into the synagogue, I'd have had time to finish this.'

I replied irritably: <How many more times do I have to tell you that I'm not Jewish.'

The pay telephone downstairs rang just now. Candy, my former girl friend, told me of a vacancy in advertising. I telephoned the agency in question only to find out that they were looking for qualified accounts staff. Typical of Candy! Her impulsiveness is one of her most endearing traits. It was this, plus her good looks, plus perhaps her constant reiteration of her aversion to long-standing relationships, which made her seem irresistible. She has a great sense of humour. She told me with a straight face, after we had gone to bed for the first time, that she had only one firm guiding principle promiscuity!

On the day that Helen and I finally split, Helen said that it was my refusal to lie about the affair which made it impossible for her to forgive me. Which to my mind is logic turned on its head. As for her accusation that I had taken up with a <working-class bimbo', she couldn't have been further from the truth. The fact is that Candy Meredith-Jones attended a posh boarding-school and knows a lot of very highly-placed people.

She arrived for her initial interview with me in a swirling cloud of intoxicating fragrance. I was impressed by her friendly, dazzling smile and her opulent figure. She was wearing a pale lemon shirt under a navy blue suit. Her thigh-length skirt revealed seductive legs. If this description stamps me as <sexist' I must point out that to ignore sex in advertising amounts to professional suicide. One of my colleagues once promised he would cut out all references to sex on the day that the Romance languages do likewise. He is on a pretty safe bet.

Candy, sitting opposite me, her hand toying delicately with her skirt, solemnly announced that one's work should always be the most important thing in one's life. I awarded her full marks for personality, ninety-five per cent for secretarial skills and one hundred per cent for sexual attractiveness.

At the time I hired her I was trying to create a TV ad for a firm of jam manufacturers. They had great future potential even though at the time they were working on a very limited budget. My account executive told me that it was all in the balance because a rival had put in a strong bid. Simpsons wanted to emphasize the fruit purity of their products. We gave them girls picking fruit in a sunlit orchard followed by a sudden cut to an interior with a fat man in lederhosen looking out at a wintry landscape. The fruitpickers enter, dance around him and sing to the tune of Ring-a-Ring of Roses: <Simpson's jam is purer, purer than the snow. Once you eat it, you can't stop. Down we go...' Cut to the fat man recumbent, his huge belly bulging with numerous jars of strawberry jam. The girls danced round him wearing scanty strawberry bikini tops and leaf-green skirts.

It was Candy who suggested the theme. And we got the business. She and I played innocently and happily together, like puppies. I can't help feeling bitter now it has become obvious that I am not the only puppy she likes playing with.

The other day, Helen granted me permission to take my children to the London Zoo. Christine and Peter seemed ill at ease. It wasn't until we were sitting in the restaurant after seeing the animals that our former loving relationship was restored. But when I told the children, just before I paid the bill, that I did not love them any the less because I was living away from home, they just stared back at me reproachfully. I can't help suspecting that Helen has turned them against me.

I have got a part-time job distributing a specialist media magazine. It has the advantage of keeping me in touch with my old profession. I haven't informed Social Security, because the amount I earn after travelling costs is minuscule. Anyway, I shall eventually need a new suit. Out of the seventy-four applications I have made so far I have obtained two interviews. The successful applicants were in their twenties.

The smell of rotting vegetation I noticed when I rented this room has now gone. The only odour is of the fish and chips I bring in occasionally for my evening meal. There is a view from the landing at the top of the stairs of a garden disfigured by broken bricks and masonry. Bedraggled maple trees separate it from an open-air section of the Underground. The sound of the trains has ceased to bother me.

Half of my unemployment benefit goes on rent. It is surprising how rapidly one becomes accustomed to a catastrophic decline in one's standard of living. My luxurious office at Colgate and Baldini now seems like a distant dream. Baldini, incidentally, never existed; he was a fiction intended to give the agency an international flavour. In recent months, when I was worried about my business debts, I used to sit at my desk inlaid with the finest quality green leather and appeal to my non-existent partner: <Baldini, should I try yet another bank? Should I sell out to another agency? Should I make a deal with my creditors? And so on.'

It is a great relief now to have it all over. Incidentally, from what I hear it is not all that uncommon for people in my profession to appeal for help to imaginary beings, human or otherwise. You could say that kind of mental weakness is almost a prerequisite for entering the business in the first place. Just as farmers are driven mad by the weather, so advertising executives are tortured by the inexplicable and mercurial changes which regularly occur in public taste and opinions. Mr Mouse, incidentally, refused to give financial advice on the grounds that it might contaminate his artistic genius.

Until quite recently I had a suite of offices in a building near Regent's Park I had bought with the help of a massive bank loan. My home was a five-bedroom, detached house in the leafy suburb of Moor Park and I drove on the advice of my accountant a Jaguar XJS. My children attended private schools. They still do courtesy of my wife's graphics business.

I blame my downfall on my financial adviser, who strongly advised me to buy the freehold of the building in which my business was located, assuring me that there would be a hefty capital appreciation. I borrowed heavily from the bank to accomplish this. An important factor in taking this gamble was the fear that Mr Mouse would one day desert me. I had a reputation for coming up with first-class concepts and was frightened my so-called creativity was on the wane. I can see in retrospect that a better solution would have been to invest in my own already successful business by poaching young and talented staff.

I am not altogether unhappy. Apart from delivering magazines on Mondays and Tuesdays which gives me an opportunity to chat with some of my former competitors I am free to do exactly what I like. I have just enough money from Social Security to feed myself. I have resigned from the West End club where I formerly entertained clients and ate and drank more than was good for me. Instead of working out in an expensive gym, I walk everywhere, which keeps me healthy. And I am finding that people in category C have a lot going for them.

There is some good news. My solicitor, in consultation with a barrister, has discovered a point of company law which may prevent the family home from being repossessed. Helen commented sourly when I told her this over the phone, <It's no great deal to be allowed to keep your own property.' She has a point. The other item of encouraging news is that Candy has promised to call on me this evening.

I once suggested, when Helen complained that she was too tired to make love, that she should sell up her business. She countered with: <Why don't you give up yours.' Which seemed silly, because at the time it provided the bulk of our income. Initially she applied for a divorce on grounds of adultery. But she subsequently changed her mind and decided, for reasons which I suspect has something to do with my bankruptcy, to wait until we have been living apart for two years.

Clive Jarvis has kindly lent me the tape-recorder I was using in his flat we have two at home but I dislike asking Helen for favours. He asked me to to let him know if I found any interesting references in the diaries to the politics of the day.

I called in at his favourite watering hole today and found him sitting up at the bar reading a copy of a rival tabloid newspaper. He has a mane of thick, rather greasy, ginger hair, a heavy, drooping moustache and a mottled boozy complexion. When he smiles, a rare enough occurrence, the corners of his mouth turn down. The first thing he asked was: <Have you gone back to your wife?'

<No chance.'

<Have another think. I've been through two divorces and they're a bugger the royal road to bankruptcy.' Then with one of his rare but famous smiles, he commented: <Sorry, old man. I'd forgotten. You already are bankrupt.' He went on in his gravelly voice: <I heard something about your girlfriend, Candy Meredith-Jones the other day. Her dad held a government post under Harold Wilson.'

<That's how he got his life peerage.'

<He's not at all loyal to his working class origins. He's always bashing the unions.'

Clive obviously enjoyed telling me this. It is this special brand of cynicism which makes him such a good political journalist. He continued: <She's got her claws into that business tycoon George Trenton.'

I tried not to look surprised and said:<Good luck to her. It's all off between us.'

Nevertheless, the news depressed me. My mind went back to an occasion when, after we had been drinking champagne in a hotel bedroom, Candy put a flower in her hair and gave an impersonation of a wild, passionate gypsy girl. We had great fun. She has a generous heart. I miss her very much. But I reminded myself, as I set off on my round of deliveries. that a jobless bankrupt isn't much of a catch. She tried her best to persuade me immediately after the business folded to seek a reconciliation with Helen. Since then Candy and I have drifted apart. To be more truthful, she has dumped me. Her businesslike tone of voice when she announced she would visit me this evening didn't sound very encouraging. However, her cooling off should not have come as too much of a surprise. especially in view of her frequently stated belief that pair-bonding was intended for swans not healthy human beings.

The news circular I deliver is a crudely-produced, black-and-white eight-page affair containing the latest gossip about events and people in the media. There is plenty of opposition from other glossy trade magazines. But Gary Booker, an old acquaintance of mine, started up this informal periodical, a freebie paid for by advertising to cater for the needs of the smaller members of the industry, when he was made redundant. I offered to write some pieces for it, but he says he can't afford to pay anybody at the moment. He puts the whole thing together himself. Meanwhile, I am glad of the few extra pounds it provides.

In the Tube on my way home this evening, a girl wearing a short crimson leather skirt with prominent nipples showing through her thin black sweater smiled invitingly at me as the jolting motion of the train threw us together. I was about to strike up a conversation but had a change of mind and dived for a seat that had just become vacant.

Still, it's encouraging to know that I'm not past it. My father doesn't appear to have been so fortunate with women. The sex life of those days could almost be described as sex death. My generation rebelled against an intolerant, repressive regime and I'm proud of what we achieved. I was on holiday with my parents at the time of Woodstock. I always regret that I didn't manage to get there.

My father's diaries suggest that war brought about only a slight relaxation of the rigid rules governing sexual behaviour. His friends, the Fischers, were more advanced in their ideas. But this can perhaps be explained by the fact that they were comparatively rich North Americans living in a more liberal environment. I am intrigued by this <foundation' Mrs Fischer intended to set up in her husband's memory. The affair she had with my father seems to have been very one-sided. I think he was fooling himself if he thought she would ever marry him. Just as well he didn't, otherwise I would not have been born!

Heavy rain began falling as I left Kilburn tube station. I sheltered for a while in the entrance to a flower shop. On a sudden impulse, I went in and bought two dozen carnations for Candy. Holding an Evening Standard over my head, I made a dash for the malodorous, converted Edwardian building I now call home.

The doorbell rang or should I say gave out a noise that sounded like an expiring death-rattle. I have complained several times to the landlord about it, so far without any result. I rushed to open the door. Candy was standing outside on the narrow landing. The contrast between the stained, threadbare grey carpet she walked on as she crossed the threshold and her expensive black boots, neatly symbolised the reversal that had taken place in our respective circumstances.

<Not exactly the Ritz is it,' I remarked sardonically, as she glanced round the room.

Candy ignored my comment, gave me a perfunctory kiss and sank into one of the fireside chairs. Fortunately, she chose the sound one.

I handed her the carnations.

She studied them impassively and murmured: <You're very sweet, Charlie. They'll remind me of all the good times we had together.'

<I still love you.'

<Thanks, Charlie. But you must understand there's a new man in my life now.'

<He's a lucky guy. You're looking great.'

<I've a ghastly cold.'

<You're as glamorous as ever.'

I helped her out of her raincoat. She was wearing a short black dress. In her husky, sexy voice she announced: <I've put on weight. I always do when I'm anxious.'

<What are you worried about?'

<Well, for one thing I'm unhappy about being the cause of your divorce.'

<Forget it come and live with me.'

She screwed up her face comically and said: <Don't be ridiculous. You should go back to your wife.'

<She doesn't want me back.'

<I really do hate being the cause of it all.'

<It would have happened anyway. Incidentally, I heard about you and George Trenton this morning.'

<At least this time I'm not coming between husband and wife. He and his wife haven't lived together for yonks.'

<Would you like some fish and chips? There's a place just across the road.'

<No thanks. Charlie. Just a cup of coffee. Incidentally, I am very sorry I made a mistake about that job.'

<It was nice of you to think of me.'

Candy looked thoughtful and then said: <Why don't you make a really big effort to get back to Helen?'

<I've told you she's quite adamant about not wanting me back.'

<It's ridiculous. Such a fuss. We only went to bed a couple of times.'

<Three times... I'll make some coffee.'

I plugged in the electric kettle.

Candy said sorrowfully: <Marriage seems to imprison people. It's so ridiculous.' Pointing with a red-tipped finger at my father's notebooks laid out on the bedspread, she enquired: <What are those?'

<My father's war-time diaries. I'm putting them in some sort of order. Just to have something to do.'

<I know a few publishers.'

<They wouldn't be interested. But my children might be some day. Some of the old man's love affairs are quite touching.'

<Darling, you must go back to advertising?'

<There are no jobs and I can't start a new business until I have been discharged from bankruptcy.'

<What about setting up in someone else's name?'

<Who's going to bankroll an undischarged bankrupt?'

Candy looked thoughtful and said after a pause: <I know someone who might George Trenton.'

<I hate him for taking you away from me.'

<Never mind that. He could help you. He's very shrewd.'

<Why should he?'

<He has his own reasons.'

I remembered reading that Trenton was one of those few, sure-footed financiers who had kept their fortunes intact during the recent economic downturn.

<Are you living with him.'

<Not exactly.'

I poured out the coffee and said hopefully: <You don't sound all that keen on him.'

<She sipped coffee thoughtfully and said: <The rich are always ravishingly interesting.'

<I'm sorry I don't come into that category.'

<Darling, we had great fun. I don't regret a moment of it.'

She gave me a fond smile.

<How about a reprise for old time's sake?'

<NO, Charlie. I won't sleep with you ever again. I am a changed person. I have become religious...I don't mean church-going religious. My grandmother died recently and it started me thinking it's about time I left some nice vibes behind me. So I have vowed in future to lay off married men. George doesn't really count. His wife is living with someone else.'

<Is he keen on you?'

<Of course. Anyway, as I was saying, the other night I was talking to him about your situation and he said he'd like to talk it over with you.'

<That was very sweet of you. But it's not easy to start a new business these days.'

Candy waved dismissively.

Her short skirt had ridden up, exposing her shapely thighs. I reached out for her hand. She held it for a moment, then relinquished it with a sigh and said: <No nonsense, Charlie. What exactly are you doing with yourself.'

<I have a little part-time job that keeps me busy for a couple of days a week. And I've made some notes on a tape-recorder about those diaries. My father flew in the RAF during the last war. I am beginning to see him in an entirely different light.'

<It must be jolly nice to have a father who was a war hero.'

<He wouldn't claim to have been that exactly. But as he says, he did his share... It must be nicer still to have a father who's a noble lord.'

<Ee, my dad's just a working class chap,' Candy said, putting on a Yorkshire accent. <How are your children? Don't you miss them?'

<They're fine. But I'm completely at Helen's mercy when it comes to seeing them. She's looking for a divorce on the grounds of separation, which will be better for everyone concerned. But if I don't cooperate, she says she'll sue on grounds of adultery.'

<Can't you explain that it all happened in a weak moment and you won't ever do it again?'

<Candy, you don't understand Helen simply doesn't want me back.'

<Perhaps you haven't tried hard enough to persuade her.'

After a moment's silence, I said solemnly: <I'd like to start again with you, honey.'

<Don't be absurd, Charlie. You know my views stable relationships are for horses, not human beings.'

She had said this many times before.

<Look, I<m going to make myself a couple of eggs I'm starving. Won't you join me.'

She looked at her watch a brand-new Cartier, the dial surrounded by small diamonds. <Okay. Can you manage?'

As I whipped the eggs furiously with a fork, Candy said thoughtfully: <I showed George some of your advertisements on the telly. He was quite impressed. He said he might be prepared to back you. He says that's the way he makes his money by investing in people.'

I served the omelette. Candy dipped her fork hesitantly into the yellow mess and began to eat.

When she had finished she announced that she had to go.

<What's the hurry?'

<George has asked a few friends to call in. He likes me to be there.'

I felt resentful. But there was nothing I could do.

I said as she reached the door: <You've forgotten your flowers.'

<Darling would you mind keeping them for me.' She added: <Oh, by the way, George is throwing a party next Wednesday evening. Do come along and meet him. About eight o'clock.'

<Okay, if you insist.'

I spent the rest of the evening immersed in the diaries.

Although I bitterly regretted not being able to win her back, it was some comfort to know that Candy was sufficiently concerned about me to try and persuade her new and very rich boy friend to help me. I loathed the thought of meeting him but decided that it would be sensible to go along with her suggestion.

The following day, I bought a second-hand TV set. I thought it might cheer me up if I watched some of my creations on the box. Unfortunately, it became depressingly evident that I have had more than my fair share of turkeys. One I found particularly embarrassing to watch, written for a large private house-builder, showed a cockney salesman flogging off pieces of the Berlin Wall from a street stall. A solid-looking business man wearing a bowler hat appears behind the salesman, and pointing to a splendid Mock Tudor house in the background, says proudly: <The walls Jackson O'Flynn build will never be sold off cheaply.' The company seemed pleased enough with the production at the time. But by the time we had finished, it was already embarrassingly out of date. Why they had brought it out of the archives again I couldn't imagine, until I suddenly realised that their advertising department had run out of money. I have had some stunning ideas recently and find it extremely frustrating not to be able to use them.

Helen claims I upset the children when I took them to the Zoo and that it has affected their schoolwork. She is being bloody-minded over the question of access. My solicitor, Shaun O'Neil, says it's all part of a planned legal strategy and assures me that in the long term it won't affect my relationship with them. It's easy for him to talk. It infuriates me when I remember that my family life has been destroyed because of some gossiping female. I suggested to Shaun humorously that in an ideal society a husband with a healthy libido whose wife refused to sleep with him should not be just entitled but should be legally obliged to take a mistress. Po-faced, he looked at his watch and said: <That concludes our business today, Charlie.' Solicitors don't waste time when you're on Legal Aid.

At night I dream of fair women as my father did before me. Candy, a lovely smiling vision, is my current succubus. There appears no hope of persuading her to leave George Trenton. She did admit over the telephone that he can be moody, single-minded and vengeful. But she insists that he can also be extremely generous. He pays her a handsome salary to act as his Personal Assistant, which helps her to keep her flat in Chelsea going. Independence was always Candy's watchword. I can't escape the feeling that she is fonder of me than she is prepared to admit and that her attachment to George Trenton, who must be in his late fifties, is part of some long-term strategy she has devised for herself.

Today, I continued editing the diaries. I shall key what I have so far dictated into a word-processor whenever I can beg, borrow or steal one. Unfortunately, the computers in my business were taken over by the liquidator my laptop was stolen from my car a few days before bankruptcy proceeding started. Helen needs the Apple-Mac at home for her work. Given the present state of our relationship, I can hardly ask her to lend it to me.

Absorbing mon pere's flying experiences has just reminded me that skywriting once used to be popular as a means of advertising. The brand name of the product was outlined in coloured smoke against the sky by a pilot flying a pre-programmed series of aerobatics. Talking of flying, I noticed in his logbook that my father got poor results when firing at a drogue towed by another aircraft. His air-to-ground firing results were a little more respectable. He told me once that he would never have made it in air-to-air combat as a fighter pilot. In the diaries he admits that he was terrified of being killed but even more terrified of failing his training courses!

There is an amusing account of how he made a date with a girl he met at a dance in the famous Blackpool Tower while stationed nearby waiting to be kitted out in uniform. He looked forward eagerly to meeting his new girl friend the following night. But when she turned up she was accompanied by her mother, who chaperoned the unhappy couple throughout the entire evening. Perhaps this illustrates more than anything else the differences between the sexual mores of today and yesterday.

The sound of my neighbour's cat loudly mewing for food outside my door has just woken me up. I had been asked to look after her by Mrs O'Dowd my neighbour, who is on holiday. Looking at my watch, I was amazed to find that it was two o'clock in the afternoon.

As I prepared Cat-O-Meat in Mrs O'Dowd's room which is much larger and tidier than my own Ginger rubbed herself ingratiatingly against my trouser legs. After ensuring that the cat flap was unimpeded, I returned to my own room. My head felt as though it didn't belong to me. Vivid, distorted images of the events of the previous night, completely out of sequence, kept coming back to me.

I had decided I might just as well accept George Trenton's invitation, issued through Candy, to visit him at his penthouse in Park Lane. There was nothing to lose. It would give me the opportunity to see Candy again and there was always the chance I might persuade her to come back to me. A uniformed doorman saluted me as I came out of the lift. He announced my name into an entry-phone and then ushered me through double-doors into a huge apartment with gilt stucco walls. I recognised my host from his photographs in the press as he approached me a stocky, powerful man with a helmet of curly iron-grey hair. After pausing to admonish a waitress, he greeted me with a warm smile, gave me a firm handshake and handed me a glass of champagne from the tray of a waiter who had paused nearby.

<You're not interested in gambling, are you?' he enquired during our walk across the spacious entrance hall, which was lined with colourful abstract paintings. I replied: <I only gamble with money I can afford to lose. There isn't much of that at the moment.'

He responded crisply: <The harder up you are the more you need to gamble.'

We entered a brilliantly-lit living-room in which groups of people were standing around nibbling delicacies served by pretty young waitresses. I was anxious to explain to Trenton that my agency had not failed through any lack of clients but rather that its downfall was due to a rash investment in property. But he gave me no opportunity to say this. After introducing me to a group of guests, he gave a curt nod and left us.

A very tall, lean, hooknosed man wearing a casual green corduroy jacket and a red spotted bow tie gave me a thoughtful, withdrawn smile. Two elderly women regarded me calculatingly from under hooded, blue tinted eyelids. A little bald man with a pale lined face and a fringe of yellowing white hair said encouragingly: <George is a great patron of the arts.'

I enquired: <What has he been up to recently?'

<Apart from sponsoring an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, he has been in Russia, buying up canvasses. Apparently, he bought enough to cover the interior walls of Canary Wharf. He's convinced that at least one of them will turn out to be a masterpiece and will repay him for his outlay.'

One of the ladies whispered in an American accent: <They say he has Mafia connections.'

<Oh, Maud,' the other lady remonstrated. <That's just a media cliché. They always say that about anybody with money. I think George is a nice guy.' She twirled her glass in her thin fingers, adding: <And he's such a generous host.'

Her friend responded: <His girl friend is lovely, isn't she.'

Candy had just appeared, wearing a low-cut, abbreviated, figure-hugging black dress. I winced at the thought of my host touching her stunningly beautiful cleavage. She approached, smiling sweetly, as I experienced a moment of real despair, and said to the other guests: <I must take Charlie away from you for a moment. There's an old friend of his in the other room.'

<Who are all these people?' I enquired, as I followed her towards the door.

'You were talking to the sisters Duquesne from Boston. They own a painting George is keen to get hold of. Peter Benton is the literary critic of the Guardian. The little old man owns an art gallery.'

She led me into a bedroom, sat on a bed with a satin quilt, drew me down beside her and kissed me warmly on the lips.

<Candy, my darling!' I said mockingly, <I thought you didn't love me any more.'

She firmly grasped the lapels of my pin-striped blue suit and said, holding her face close to mine, <That was just for old time's sake. I've brought you in here to brief you on George.'

<He came out to meet me.'

<Yes and you've made a good impression,' Candy said earnestly. <George either takes to people or he doesn't. He may not tell you tonight what he has in mind for you. But you'll hear from him in due course.'

<What have you been saying about me?'

<Just the truth that you are extremely good at your job.'

<So why should he do anything for me?'

<You'll find out.'

<Is he in love with you?'

<George has never loved anything in his life except himself.'

<Why have you bothered to do this for me?'

<Because I'm genuinely sorry for all the trouble I have caused you and your wife.'

<It wasn't your fault, honeychild you don't have to feel badly about it. But I do appreciate what you're doing.'

<Then go back into the party and enjoy yourself.'

<I believe we're going to work together,' a tall, willowy girl with red hair announced to me shortly afterwards. She had just introduced herself as Lucinda Trenton, one of Trenton's three daughters. Her pale face was full of freckles. She went on: <Daddy intends to set us both up in a new advertising agency?'

I said without expression: <Why on earth would you want to go into such a cut-throat business?'

She replied, lifting up her head proudly: <I decided long ago that that was where I intended to make my mark. I did a little training as an account executive with an American agency. I found the work fascinating. <Unfortunately, I was taken ill and had to give it up.'

So this was why George Trenton was interested in my track record in advertising. He had invited me to his party to provide a career for his daughter, Candy having acted as the honest broker. It rankled that I was in no position to refuse.

I said sympathetically: <That was tough luck. Are you feeling better now?'

<Oh, yes. I'm fine now.'

<I suppose you have learned it's not honey and roses all the way. Advertising sounds glitzy and glamorous but there's a lot of very hard work involved. It's not easy to persuade companies to part with their money. They sometimes demand guarantees, which it is impossible to provide. And they don't always believe in market research, even when it's their own!'

Lucinda nodded, sagely.

<Yes, I got a good idea of what it was all about during the time I was with C. J. Peterson.'

I was familiar with the name of the agency. I told her about people I knew whose careers had foundered after a brilliant start, not wishing her to have any illusions about what might be in store for her, if I consented to the deal Trenton had in mind.

She listened intently and said she was realistic about her her own limitations. She had taken a PPE at university and had recently earned a diploma in business administration. She would love eventually, when she had accumulated enough experience, to employ a team of talented, creative people and build up a financially-sound agency. She didn't sound at all frivolous about the whole thing. I was pleased at her display of commonsense.

Shortly afterwards we were joined by two of her friends: Allison, a solemn-looking narrow-shouldered girl with cropped brown hair, who worked for a firm of City brokers and a medical student, Marumi, a little Japanese girl with a complexion like delicate porcelain.

Gently sloshed by this time, I waved across the room to Candy, who rewarded me with an indulgent smile.

I exchanged some light-hearted banter with the girls and after I had told them about some amusing incidents I had witnessed while observing the makings of some commercials, Lucinda suddenly said: <Why don't we all go to my place.'

We descended in the lift. Outside, the commissionaire hailed a taxi. Lucinda gave the driver an address in Fulham. As the taxi drew up beside a large redbrick mansion. I noticed a sports Mercedes in racing green parked nearby. We entered a ground-floor flat. A double door off a narrow hall led into a living-room with red patterned wallpaper dimly illuminated by Tiffany-style lampshades. The ceilings were high, with elaborate plaster work. Almost immediately we were joined by two young men, one pasty-faced, tall and weedy, the other red-complexioned and thickset with a thatch of corn-coloured hair.

Lucinda introduced us.

<Terence, Andrew meet my new partner, Charlie Colgate.'

<I suppose you brush your teeth ten times a day,' Terence suggested, smiling at his own wit.

<Nothing to do with the toothpaste people I'm in advertising. I tried to get their account once but didn't succeed.'

Terence said: <That's very interesting. How about an ad for this?'

He produced a small silver box full of white powder.

I replied, straight-faced: <We did an ad for hemlock once. We called it a permanent cure for insomnia.'

Terence said cheerfully to Lucinda, who had just sat on a sofa, <Who's this funny guy?'

I said: <It's okay. Go ahead. I don't want to spoil the fun.'

I had smoked a little grass in my time and didn't expect the effect of coke to be much different. A little later I was being gently rebuked for sneezing away an excessive amount of very expensive white powder.

I didn't enjoy it much. The conversation became increasingly inane. We tried to play a new board game but couldn't agree on the rules, which were very complicated. We drank more champagne. I offered politely to make love to Lucinda. She matter-of-factly declined.

Shortly afterwards I fell asleep on a sofa patterned with blue and cerise peacocks. They strutted about me, their gorgeous plumes unfolding and waving. One of them, strongly resembling Lucinda, pecked at me and admonished me for not understanding the meaning of the word <snow.'

The room spun. I shut my eyes.

A steady pounding of aircraft engines matched the beating of my heart. Below, shimmering ice floes protruded from an iridescent waste of solid pack ice stretching for hundreds of miles to a horizon which merged imperceptibly into a leaden grey sky. I worried that I might soon be forced to land in this inhospitable wasteland of snow and ice, to die from frost-bite or be eaten by polar bears.

When I woke up it was daylight. Lucinda, lay beside me in bed, her frizzy titian hair spread out on a satin pillow. She eyed me oddly then tugged at a brassiere on which I was lying. My head was aching. My thoughts were chaotic. I said slowly: <What was that shit?'

<What do you mean shit! It's the finest quality you can get.'

I said: <Does Daddy know you use this stuff?'

Lucinda enquired, pouting: <Why are you going to tell him?'

<It's nothing to do with me,'

<Good. Didn't you like it?'

<Not much.'

I wandered into the sitting-room. It was in a state of disorder. The other guests had gone. I had only a faint recollection of what had occurred the night before. In an attempt to find out, I said to Lucinda, who had followed me: <Did we celebrate our new partnership pleasantly?'

She gave an enigmatic smile and announced that she was going to make some coffee.

<Did we?' I persisted, as we sat on stools with mugs of coffee in our hands.

Giving a little shrug, Lucinda said: <Let's forget all about last night and concentrate on the important thing of building up a really successful agency.'

<You've said it,' I declared approvingly.

I remembered, as I journeyed by Underground to Kilburn station, that in the course of browsing through my father's diaries the previous afternoon I had come across a passage describing flights across frozen seas. Which probably explained the peculiar dream about ice-floes and the polar bears.

My eyes keep closing as I speak into the tape-recorder. Whatever I took last night is still running through my system and taking a remorseless revenge. Something in my subconscious triggered an emotional rip-tide. I thought about the family I had once enjoyed and found myself sitting at the table, weeping tears of despair.

The last time I cried was twenty-eight years ago, shortly after my twelfth birthday. Although my father was nominally Jewish, I had had no contact with Judaism. Suddenly, he became obsessed with the hare-brained notion that I should study Hebrew in order, as he put it, <to carry on the family tradition.' He wanted me to be barmitzvah a religious rite of passage that consists of reading from the Scrolls of the Law in a synagogue. My mother, who as I have indicated, wasn't Jewish, was totally confused by my father's bizarre suggestion.They said harsh things to each other. Caught in the crossfire, I felt utterly miserable. My mother's argument that my exam results would suffer eventually prevailed.

I was neither Jew nor Christian. I wept. My older sister, Sadie, put both parents to shame by exclaiming as she pointed to me: <Now look what you've done! It's not his fault he's not Jewish.'

Later, by a strange irony it turned out that my father's flying duties were going to take him away during the time when the barmitzvah would have been celebrated. He had been sent on a posting to an Arab airline, which because of the political situation at that time made it necessary for him to hide the fact that he was a Jew.

The matter was never referred to again. I was never barmitzvah, for which I was heartily thankful.

I shall never take drugs again. At least if you stick with alcohol, you accept, as just, the familiar punishment of a hangover. But the stuff I took at Lucinda's place has left me depressed and enervated. I keep getting flashbacks to a past which never existed.

I received a letter from Lucinda.

Dear Charlie,

Since we shall be working together soon, I thought I had better write and let you know that I'm sorry we messed around with drugs the other night. Terence is an awful nerd.

I also regret it very much if I gave the impression that I am approaching our joint venture other than very seriously. My one ambition is to get settled into a career. I appreciate what you said about advertising being a frivolous vocation that requires the utmost dedication. And I fully understand that it takes a very long time for an agency to build up a reputation.

Would you care to have lunch with me some time soon, so that we can get to know each other better and discuss arrangements for the new business. Daddy's solicitors are working out the legal details. He would like you to draw up a list of requirements, staff, office equipment and so on. Incidentally, I recently took a course on Word Perfect, so at least I can pull my weight in a secretarial capacity, although of course, I am eagerly looking forward to helping you win clients and to learning the essentials of what I appreciate is a highly complex business.

Sincerely,

Lucinda.

To use one of my dad's war-time phrases, Lucinda <hasn't a clue' about the uphill task that lies ahead of us. Still, I am pleased that she is showing enthusiasm.

I have no illusion about the problems ahead. There is savage competition at the moment for a reduced volume of advertising. The fact that I am personally bankrupt doesn't help and may cause some of my former friends in the industry to fight shy of me. It's a comfort to know that, in spite of this, George Trenton is still prepared to provide financial backing. It occurs to me that I may have a problem in the longer term, because, in effect, I am training my pupil to become my successor. However, that's a long way ahead and in the meantime, thanks to Candy, my fortunes are showing signs of improvement.

Why she has used her influence with George Trenton in this manner I don't fully understand. It is also curious that she keeps trying to persuade me to go back to Helen. I'm pretty sure she is still in love with me I can usually tell. Still, I must be grateful for her efforts on my behalf. She seems prepared to sacrifice her own happiness. Which, of course, makes me want her more than ever.

I have arranged to meet Lucinda for dinner at my favourite Italian restaurant. Presumably, since I am going at her invitation, she will pay. Saving on a meal tomorrow will allow me the luxury of fish and chips tonight.

I called at my former home yesterday to collect some of my possessions. I had hired a taxi for this purpose. As we came into the semi-circular drive, the sharp-eyed taxi-driver commented on how the new extension blended in nicely with the rest of the manor-type house. We had had it built to cover the swimming-pool. The architect had certainly earned his fee. I remembered Helen commenting shrewdly when it was finished: <It gives the house extra kerb appeal.' Her pale blue Mercedes standing in the drive was a cruel reminder to me that I no longer owned a car.

Buffy, our sand-coloured Labrador, greeted me with a wagging tail. I was about to remark flippantly to Helen that dogs do not approve of divorce. But observing her resentful expression, I decided to remain silent.

Noticing the taxi as she opened the front-door, Helen remarked coolly: <I could have met you at the station?'

<I didn't want to trouble you.'

I entered the oak-panelled hall and said, thinking to please her, <You've lost weight, Helen'

<I'm having to work like stink to pay the school fees, that's why.'

<You look very glamorous,'

<I'm meeting an important client for lunch.'

<He's a lucky man.'

<It's a woman,' Helen corrected me dourly.

We went upstairs into the bedroom we once shared. The bed was unmade. Rummaging through a white chest of drawers, I came across some dress studs and black bow ties. I remarked: <No point in taking these. It'll be a long time before I attend any social functions.'

<Take them,' Helen commanded. <You're not going to be down and out all your life.'

<What gives you that impression?'

<I know you. You're a tough cookie.'

Pocketing them, I muttered : <It'll be years before I get on my feet again.'

<If you had been concentrating on your work, instead of humping your secretary, you would still be in business'

<Roger Skelcrow advised me to buy the office building.'

<Any fool could have guessed that he was lining his own pocket.'

I carried an armful of clothing down to the waiting taxi, re-entered the house and continued collecting my belongings. I noticed on the dressing-table a large bill from a health farm. Helen was obviously exaggerating her financial difficulties.

When I had finished and was about to leave, Helen said: <How on earth do you spend your time?'

<Why should you care?'

Helen replied crossly: <Can't you understand that I can still be concerned about you. We were married a long time, if you recall.'

<It certainly seemed a long time. If you must know, I found my father's war-time diaries in the grip I took when I left home. I'm editing them. Perhaps the children will read them when they grow up.'

<You could do worse things, I suppose.' Helen conceded grudgingly. <Your father seems to have been quite a

romantic young man in his day. I suppose they all were in those days.'

<You've read the diaries?' I said, surprised.

<I glanced through them once. They made me feel rather sad.'

<They were tough times. He seems to have stopped keeping a diary at the end of 1944 when his late friend's widow returned to Canada.'

<Are you using a word processor?'

<No. All my computers were taken by the Official Receiver.'

Helen then offered to let me have an Amstrad laptop the children no longer used.

I thanked her and ran back upstairs to retrieve it from a cupboard in Peter's room I am typing these words into it now. However, during the brief conversation we had when I returned, she made it quite clear that she was determined to go through with the divorce.

I said, lamely: <No hard feelings.'

She replied: <None whatsoever. Are you seeing much of Candy?'

<No.'

<Then you had better go find yourself another woman. You're not the kind of man who can manage by himself.'

Buffy was panting heavily beside me. I patted his head, pecked Helen on her pale cheek and said; <I'll manage okay. Goodbye.'

I decided on the way to the station that perhaps it was just as well things were the way they were. The two women in my life are utterly different. Helen is too uptight, too unforgiving Candy too soft, too yielding. I obviously need someone in between those two extremes.

But first I must get on my feet again. If the proposed new agency takes off I shall bear in mind that some of my recent work was not all that good. It lacked <charisma'. This is a word which deserves its place in the English language. Animals have it in trumps but it is only found in the finest works of art. It's elusive and when you think you have found it, it slithers from your grasp. Mr Mouse gets in a fine old tizzy when I reject one of his ideas, as I do very occasionally, because it doesn't meet this essential requirement. He sulks and goes into his mousehole, swearing that it will be a long time before he returns. Without charisma one has to fall back on humour, which is ephemeral and chancy. I once created an ad in which an enraptured girl with luscious lips holding a bar of chocolate, exclaimed: <It's Oh! so Oh! So Orgasmic!' The camera crew rocked with laughter. I thought we are on a winner. But it bombed completely and I lost an important client.

The success of advertising, however well researched and constructed, rests ultimately on the mood of the public. Anticipating its swift and subtle changes can defeat even the best of market researchers. This uncertainty element keeps you on your toes all the time and is something Helen could never quite grasp.

Her accusation concerning the TV commercial featuring a Second World War Royal Air Force bomber command pilot caught me on the raw. It is well known that a father-son relationship can be difficult because of an element of unspoken competition between them. Although I love and admire my father, I have always resented his reluctance to acknowledge my own success. Because of my business and other worries, it is some months since I last visited him.

During the train journey back to Kilburn I came across a speech in a newspaper made by George Trenton at the Institute of Directors. He said: <The secret of success is to turn every experience to your advantage. A friend of mine, looking at my portly frame, recently said: ?George, you are getting too fond of your food." Drawing a certain conclusion from his remark, I promptly instructed my stockbroker to buy into the food sector. If I had gone on one of these fashionable diets, I would be a lot thinner. So also would be my wallet.'

It is important for me to understand the mind of George Trenton, since he is providing the finance for my next venture.

My father's sensitivity on the subject of the supposed dinghy-sighting seems to have had something to do with his having desired his friend's wife. He even blamed himself just for dreaming about her. In comparison with the episode in the Bible when King David ordered Uriah the Hittite into the heat of battle when he had the hots for his wife, Bathsheba, his offence didn't amount to much.

But people are much more driven by emotion than by reason. If that were not true, I would advertise baked beans purely on the basis of their nutritional value. I am trying to make the point that my father's friend, Bud, was one of those powerful and persuasive figures who have a hypnotic influence over other people. He had a considerable gift for advertising his beliefs I would have been glad to employ him in my agency. My father may have argued strongly against him but he may have still been unconsciously affected by his ideas. That's the best explanation I can offer for the irrational way he reacted to the supposed dinghy-sighting after his friend had gone missing. One can add to that the element of unreasoning guilt the people feel when someone dies.

Incidentally, it has just dawned on me that the reason Helen was so critical of my advertisement for hair shampoo was that we had only learned a day or two before of my father's second disabling stroke. It seems very doubtful now whether he will ever be able to add any useful information concerning his war-time adventures. Which is a pity, because I should like to know how his affair with Ruth ended. I suppose I should have examined the diaries, which I had always been vaguely aware were somewhere in the house. But I was far too busy. One always imagines there will be endless time ahead in which to do these things.

My edited version of the diaries is now on a floppy disk. It will, I guess, eventually end up in a drawer lost and forgotten as the notebooks had been. But the exercise has served its purpose of keeping my mind occupied during a particularly difficult period.

I met Lucinda for dinner as planned. We agreed on a West End location for our new office. Lucinda undertook to choose the decor and furnishings. She will act as my P.A and receptionist and do some selling as well. I shall take on, as I did in the early days of my former business, the combined roles of account executive and copy writer. I have contacted a brilliant lady who left her company to have a baby and has agreed to work for us as artistic director on a part-time basis, which suits us both at present. She is, incidentally, an enthusiastic proponent of animation.

I shall notify my former clients that I am back in business again and renew contacts with the TV and radio production companies I used to work with. George Trenton's name and reputation will be enough to persuade them of our credit-worthiness.

I have drawn up a business plan to show George Trenton, prudently adding twenty-per cent to my estimate of the start-up capital required. During the first year we shall make a loss. With a large measure of luck, if I manage to woo back some of my old clients, we could break even in the second year. I shall tell George Trenton that there is every possibility of moving into profit in the third. I recognise that he will be a hard man to deal with. It grieves me that I can't persuade Candy to come back to me. But I must be grateful that she has engineered it so that I can, so to speak, have another bite at the cherry. It doesn't come to everyone.

* * *

As I indicated, my business dinner with Lucinda went off well. But a second one a few days later put the frighteners on me. I dined off my usual risotto followed by veal cutlets accompanied by a vintage Claret. Lucinda ate very little but drank a great deal of wine. I hadn't realised just how much until she stumbled as we were walking to her Saab, which was parked outside the restaurant.

I said: <Are you all right?'

She responded with a surly: <No, I'm not all right I'm pissed. You'll have to drive me home.'

I said: <Okay. Give me your keys.'

She slumped beside me with her head on my shoulder. I persuaded her to sit upright and drove her back to her place in Fulham. I must say the experience of driving a powerful, well-equipped car made me nostalgic for my days of motoring glory. However, it won't be long before I own a set of wheels again.

I pulled up outside her flat. Lucinda walked unaided to the front door. I handed her the car keys, but she insisted that I come inside, complaining that she felt nauseous.

In the apartment, she offered me a drink and when I refused poured herself out a large glass of Glenlivet.

I protested: <Watch it, Lucinda. You've had enough.'

<I know how much I can take. Come and sit down.'

She pushed me onto an ottoman and sat beside me. I sat silently for a while and then got up and said: <I'm going home.'

<Don't be absurd. The last bus has gone.'

<I'll get a taxi.'

<Charlie, stop being so naff.'

<If we're going to make a success of this project, we both need plenty of sleep.'

<You're a prat, Charlie. A pompous super-prat.'

I walked towards the front door but found it locked. Lucinda's voice behind me said: <I didn't mean to lock you in, lover-boy. I always put the mortise lock on. It isn't safe hereabouts.' Slipping her hand over my shoulder, she said in a seductive voice: <Just come and have one little drinky and then I'll let you go.'

I went back reluctantly into the sitting-room. Lucinda poured me out a scotch and commanded: <Sit down, Charlie and let's have another business talk.'

<Are you in a fit state ?'

<Oh, come on. I bet you often used to get pissed with your clients when you were discussing business.'

<You're not a client.'

<I'm even more important than a client, Charlie. I'm your partner.'

Lucinda giggled, placed her drink on the floor and kissed me warmly and passionately.

<Why are you so keen to go home?' she enquired, pouting a little, when I drew away.

<I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.'

< What's the matter with mine?'

<You're too drunk to know what you're doing.'

<On the contrary I know exactly what I'm doing. You're my partner you might just as well be my sleeping partner.' Lucinda retrieved her whiskey from the floor and giggled as she rotated the glass between her fingers.

Shaking my head slowly, I said: <I don't think this is going to work. We are just about to ask your father to fork out an enormous amount of money. Let's give it a miss for the moment.'

<Daddy doesn't give a shit who I sleep with. Stop acting like a nerd.'

I sat down again and surveyed the room.

<Nice piece of Lalique,' I said inconsequentially of an Art Deco nude on the mantelpiece

<Kiss me,' Lucinda ordered.

I kissed her at first without much enthusiasm but appetite comes with the eating. She placed her glass on the floor and guided my hand inside her bra.

<That's more like it!' she said cheerfully and drawing away, said: <Let's get a buzz on.'

<I already have a buzz on.'

<Don't be a spoilsport. I have some heavenly stuff. It'll blow your mind.'

I had completely forgotten about the last occasion when we had dabbled with cocaine. The dismal message winged its way into my mind that Lucinda was a druggy, which put the new agency in peril even before it was born.

Lucinda stood up and said: <I'm going to get the goodies, Charlie.'

I asked myself should I play along or walk out of her life and give up the project that had become my last and only hope of salvation.

Reading my mind, Lucinda said: <It would be such a pity if this whole thing fell through because we can't get on.'

Sit down, honey,' I said in a silky tone. I've got something to tell you.'

Looking slightly puzzled, she sat down beside me. I then drew her into a passionate embrace and announced: <Let's really make this partnership work. honey in bed as well as out.'

Lucinda drew back and said impatiently: <Lay off it, Charlie, I need a fix first.'

Living alone takes some getting used to. But I have made one friend Ginger, my neighbour's marmalade cat. She visits me quite often. I was worrying about how Lucinda's addiction might affect my plans, when I heard a familiar mewing. I opened the door and Ginger made an entrance, in the show-stopping manner of a movie star She brushed sinuously against me, waving her tail as if it were an ermine stole, mewed again twice piteously and then sat down, gazing up at me with an unblinking stare. I could tell that she was trying to hypnotise me into repeating a little trick she recently taught me involving a saucer and a milk bottle. I defied her steady gaze for as long as I could and then said confidentially:

<You'll never believe this, Ginger, but I'm between a rock and a hard place. Just when things were beginning to look up, I discover that the partner I'm supposed to train as an advertising executive has turned out to be a dopehead. It looks as though my hopes of renewing my business career are going to be dashed. I shan't be able to trust Lucinda for one single minute. I know all about this kind of problem. She will become thoroughly unreliable, antagonise clients and take expensive cures in private rehab clinics. Her daddy will probably blame me for her condition, withdraw support and leave me penniless.

Furthermore, Pussy Cat, even if, with a tremendous effort, I manage to keep the lady off drugs for a while which might even necessitate marrying her sooner or later she will let me down with a vengeance. So what do you advise, Ginger? Stop that piteous miaowing. Your bulging midriff reminds me of a fat Beryl Cook lady or a Reubens woman. Anyway, I haven't told you the full story yet. Nor shall I if you don't stop that disgusting noise.'

Ginger, having sniffed curiously all around the leaking rusty fridge, settles down on my bed with a look of cynical weariness. Nevertheless, she manages to communicate to me that in return for a promise of several hundred gallons of milk, she might be prepared to offer some sound advice.

I continue: <Well, Ginger. Last night I was disgusted to find that Lucinda gets a greater buzz from coke than from making love, which shows that she has crossed over the line which separates those who merely dabble with drugs from the hopelessly enslaved. So what should I do? Tell her daddy that I'm withdrawing from the partnership, or carry on and hope for the best?'

<...Milk the situation whichever way I can for my own good? Clever cat. I get the message. Your advice has just earned you a saucerful of milk.'

There is a knock on the door. The Rastifarian who lives downstairs informs me that I have a bell. I go down to the phone in the hall. It's Candy, anxious to know how my business dinner with Lucinda had gone. I told her everything I had just confided to Ginger.

I ask: <Do you think it advisable to tell her father.'

<I think he already knows.'

<Then why the hell didn't he tell me? And more to the point, why didn't you?'

<I honestly didn't know about it when I first invited you to meet George. But he has told me since then. He honestly believes that having a new interest in life will help Lucinda to wean herself off her habit.'

<Candy,' I replied, <he's fooling himself. You know and I know that the situation can only get worse. Eventually, the whole shebang will go down the tubes, leaving me in an even worse situation that I'm in now. What do you want me to do?'

<I'll tell George that you've found out. Let him decide.'

<Okay. I'll wait till I hear from him. I won't send him my business plan. There's no point.'

<I'm so sorry, Charlie. I was only trying to help you.'

<It's all right, honey. I tell you what, why not persuade George to make you my partner.'

A long silence, followed by a fervent: <Charlie, I do so wish that was possible.'

But it obviously wasn't.

Well, I thought philosophically. It's all over. I'd better get down to reading the diaries again and try to guess what it was like being a war-time pilot flying old-fashioned propeller planes.

Mr Mouse has gone on strike a direct result of my recent dealings with a certain feline predator. If I am forced to choose between them, there is little contest, because I rely on Mr Mouse for my bread and butter. He is keenly aware of this. All the same, I do really like marmalade cat simply for the reason that she is such a brazen, self-serving egotistical little monster.

I can best illustrate her peculiar genius by repeating a series of questions I put to her and the answers she gave.

Charles: Pussy Cat, should I continue to sleep with Lucinda, now that I know she's an unredeemable junky?

Ginger: Of course. Keep her daddy on your side for as long as possible. You've a no-hoper if you don't. Buy her flowers, chocolates and perfume. Let her think you're her chief lover. She probably has others.

Charles: And what shall I say to George Trenton?

Ginger: Let him think that you are tolerant of Lucinda's drug habit. If necessary, tell him you've dabbled yourself you have on more than one occasion and it's no big deal.

Charles: Is it okay to renew my affair with Candy?

Ginger: That would be risky. It might antagonise Mr Money Bags. Get him to finance your new agency as soon as possible. You may just have enough time to pull it off before Lucinda climbs up a moonbeam. If you can hang on in there till you have been discharged from bankruptcy, you may even be able to take over the whole show.

Charles: What about my divorce?

Ginger: Don't let Helen know you're in business again. If she suspects that you've made a come-back she'll ask for a big heap of alimony.

Charles: She's bound to get to hear of it.

Ginger: Okay. In that case tell her that you're only working for a pittance.

Charles: Thank you, Ginger. You give excellent advice.

Mr Mouse is a different kettle of fish. When he emerges from his mousehole, he does his best to lead me into that weird cockeyed, surrealist world that is a copywriter's dream. Fortunately, before this misunderstanding arose he gave me at least a dozen splendid ideas for various products, which I hope to use when I'm back in business. I refrained from offering them to former colleagues because I knew they would shamelessly adopt them as their own. In the meantime, thank you, Mr Mouse, for your past kindnesses and consideration. It's a great pity, though, that you steadfastly refused to help me when I was working on my father's diaries.

I must now acknowledge that both cat and mouse sworn enemies in nature represent different parts of my psyche. This is why the conversations seem so real to me. I shall now address Mr Mouse again and ask him if it is possible, using his fabulous intuitive powers, to guess what happened to my father and Ruth Fischer during the last phase of the war and its aftermath. I should also like to know whether the ideas of Bud Fischer influenced my father. I say this because at one time he had this whim I can call it no more than that to have me instructed in the Jewish religion. Unfortunately, he is too ill to be questioned.

Mr Mouse says he will oblige me by answering these questions only if I cut off diplomatic relations with a certain carnivorous cat... I shall have to consider that proposal.

* * *

A telephone call from Helen most unusual, because she normally only contacts me through her solicitor. She informs me that she is going to a health farm for a week and would like me to take the children out at the weekend. I thought I detected a conciliatory tone in her voice this time. Presumably, because she was asking for a favour.

And another telephone call this time from Lucinda with profuse apologies for her unforgivable behaviour. Her lapse into druggery was a temporary one, the result of certain hormonal problems. Please don't tell Daddy he would be most upset. She would like to take me out to dinner again to a quiet little place in Chelsea. In the meantime, is there anything she can do to help our project along. I gave her the name and address of an ex-client who has an expanding computer software business. I tell her to sell him an idea for a local radio campaign that will cost him pennies and bring in pounds. He's a tough cookie and our last effort on his behalf wasn't all that effective. It will be good, though, for her to suffer rejection. Getting hardened to insults and temporary defeat is the only way to succeed in selling.

I am very curious to know what happened between my father and Ruth Fischer. If I can find out, it will provide a suitable ending to a story which in years to come could form an important part of my family history. My children and grandchildren, if I ever have any, will appreciate it. Unfortunately, the thought occurs to me that there won't be much of a family left after the divorce.

It seems to me unlikely that my father abandoned his war-time diary-keeping while he was still engaged in operational flying. If there were other notebooks, my mother, who died ten years ago, may have thrown them away, perhaps because she didn't like the idea of my father having an earlier lover. This certainly would not have been characteristic of her. When circumstances permit, I'll ask Helen to search the house again.

<Are you fond of my daughter?' George Trenton enquired.

He had a faint almost sheepish, smile on his face as he asked the question. I guessed he was embarrassed because he was acting like an old-fashioned paterfamilias. Candy had warned me that he could be both cunning and brutally direct. He was obviously deeply concerned about Lucinda.

We were sitting in his company headquarters, a spacious office, comfortably furnished in rosewood, that seemed suspended high above the Thames. Below, motor boats and a river bus were leaving glistening white wakes in the pale green waters.

Am I fond of Lucinda? I recall her fragile limbs, a freckled throat and small, rather nicely-shaped snowy-white breasts. Also, that I can't help resenting that her pleasure comes principally from a noxious white powder.

<I don't think she regards me as anything but a business partner,' I reply.

<Since you haven't answered the question.' Trenton said, with a resigned look, <I shall assume that the answer is in the negative.'

I felt a need to apologise, But he continued: <It's all right, Charlie. Just thinking aloud. Ms Meredith-Jones (Why doesn't he call her Candy?) has informed me that you know Lucinda has a drug problem.'

<She seems to have it well under control.'

<Do you think you can help her keep it that way?'

Trenton gazed at me steadily.

<Naturally, I'll do all I can. I don't know a great deal about drug dependency. But I have heard that some people manage to function perfectly well. Has she had medical advice?'

Trenton grimaced. The sun shone on his helmet of iron-grey hair.

<You might as well know the worst. She has been in and out of expensive clinics during the past three and a half years. She has cost me a great deal of money. But I'm determined to save her, if I possibly can. The reason I asked you if you were fond of her is because we that is to say my former wife and I thought that if she had a steady relationship it might help her. However, I'm advised that it doesn't always work. I am now hoping that she will become deeply involved in a career that will allow her to function normally. What do you think?'

<I've experimented a little with drugs myself. From what I've seen she's not all that bad. We get along together pretty well. I don't see why we shouldn't make a go of it. As a matter of fact, today she is interviewing a former client of mine. I'm hoping he might give us some business. I thought it would be a good idea to throw her in at the deep end.'

George Trenton nodded approval. He had responded well so far. The important question was: would he come up with the money.

I continued <I've brought along a business plan, just in case you want to go ahead.'

I handed him the file of papers I had prepared.

Trenton put on his gold half-spectacles, examined it for about sixty seconds, his eyes charging rapidly through the pages of figures. Then he placed it on his desk and said: <I'll show it to my accountant. But off the top of my head, I should think that you could chop at least thirty per cent off your proposed start-up costs.'

I replied with the words I had made up as I came up in the elevator to his office: <My great-grandfather, a successful business man, is supposed to have said: <Always light extra candles the moment you start in business,'

Trenton replied coolly: <I'll examine your figures in detail and let you know what I intend to do. If we go ahead, I may be able to provide you with some contacts. You will be on salary plus bonus. If you make a success of it, I'll eventually allocate you thirty-per cent of the shares and when you're discharged from bankruptcy, you have a good chance of becoming an executive director.'

I thanked him. He stood up and said impassively, as he accompanied me to the door: <Ms Meredith-Jones sends her regards.' I realised then that the formal manner of his reference to Candy hinted that he knew about our former relationship and wanted me to distance myself from her. I thought vengefully: we'll see about that.

I went home by bus and Tube, feeling on the whole quite pleased, having derived the impression that he would soon give the go ahead. I had already prepared brochures for prospective clients outlining the many successful advertising campaigns in which I had been involved. A small suite of offices off Oxford Street had just become available on very reasonable terms. Its only drawback was that it was close to Helen's place of work.

Later that afternoon, I called on Stan Brightwood, a genius in computerised animation, and asked him to cooperate with our new art director on a campaign I had in mind.

On the strength of my successful conversation with Trenton I dined out at a pizza parlour. When I got home and switched on the TV, an example of Stan Brightwood's technique appeared like magic on the screen. It seemed a good omen.

* * *

Later, sitting in a fireside chair, I was nearly asleep when a small, amorphous grey phantom entered my mind. Soon Mr Mouse materialised, chewing on his whiskers with the distracted, slightly agitated look he cultivates when he has the task of passing on a message from on high.

He cleared his throat and announced in a squeaky voice: <I am about to kill two birds with one stone, in a move which will be greatly to your advantage. But there is a condition. Once you have finished the biography on which you have been wasting your energies, you must promise never again to abandon your chosen profession. If you do exactly what I say, I will help you once again to become a force to be reckoned with in the advertising world. If you don't give me this assurance, I will disappear from your life for ever.'

I listened with a cynical expression on my face, although the threat seemed real and intimidating enough. As Mr Mouse began cleaning his whiskers rather officiously, I replied: <First of all, let me point out one important fact: I created you; you did not create me. I'm the master conjurer who gives you life, sustenance and being. Without me you are nothing.'

Mr Mouse then performed one of his famous disappearing tricks. My heart lurched. But I made an exaggerated pretence at not caring and went over in my mind various points raised during my discussion with George Trenton. He was apparently willing to gamble on the planned agency, in the hope that it would help his daughter overcome her addiction, although my instinct was that she had gone beyond the point of no return. Since betting against the odds was not a characteristic of George Trenton. I wondered did he have something else in mind.

As I puzzled over this, I experienced a sudden and intense yearning for reassurance. <Come back, Mr Mouse,' I pleaded. <Come back. I'll do anything anything. I'll commit murder, if necessary.'

Nothing happened.

So I went and sat in front of my computer, my hands poised over the keys, hoping this familiar posture would encourage him to return. Then I remembered his words and made a solemn vow that, if he would return as my source of inspiration, I would declare Ginger persona non grata and from now on remain forever faithful to my first love, advertising. The effect was immediate and dramatic. My rodent guru materialised looking larger and more authoritative than ever. Smoothing his whiskers, he declared: <Here, then, is a clue relevant both to the ill-conceived biography of your father and to your future career. I will say it once and once only: AGONY'.

After pronouncing this word he disappeared.

I called: <Come back, Mr. Mouse. What the hell did you mean?' But he refused to return.

I was puzzled. I decided to apply the word first of all to the biography of which Mr Mouse so strongly disapproved. If Mr Mouse was referring to the wounds of war, it certainly didn't apply to my father because he had escaped physical injury.

This was not the first time Mr Mouse had given advice in such an enigmatic form. Whenever in the past, he has chosen to do this, something tangible and useful has invariably followed. Certainly in relation to advertising I could not see any relevance to the word he had given me. However, all I could do was to have faith in my mousey Muse. Throughout all the years I have known him he has never let me down.

Nevertheless, I found myself typing the words: <If I seem insane talking to myself, or rather to a non-existent rodent, it doesn't matter. In this crazy world of advertising there is only one thing that counts and that's results.'

My mother was a tall, rather delicate-looking blond with even features. I favour her in looks. My father, is or rather was before he went bald dark-haired. He is four inches shorter than I am. In his youth he bore a certain resemblance to one of the Marx Brothers the one who played the piano. He my father was obviously a late developer and seems to have been very shy with women. This would explain the overwhelming emotional effect on him of his first real sexual experience. It is puzzling that he does not appear to have carried out his intention of following Ruth Fischer to Canada after he had been demobilised. If he had, I am sure I would have heard about it. However, travel was slow and expensive in those days and perhaps after months of separation his ardour faded.

Helen telephoned me. Not as I thought at first to discuss our divorce but to pass on to me the information that the children's school reports were not up to much. I asked her how the notebooks and logbook came to be in the canvas grip I took from home. She explained that she had come across them when my father went into the nursing home and had left them there because we had run short of cupboard space. After an ill-tempered argument, Helen suddenly asked if I had visited my father recently. Before giving me a chance to reply she rounded on me for my neglect. I told her it was a difficult journey to St. Albans by public transport.

<If you loved him, you would walk there.'

<How is the old boy?'

<Very gaunt. He's not at all well.'

<Has his speech come back?'

<No, but he is in full command of his senses.'

Helen then placed the full blame for our children's unsatisfactory school reports on what she described as my thoughtless and irresponsible conduct. She has a rare genius for making me feel uncomfortable. I promised her that I would visit my father the following day. Unfortunately, I was unable to keep my promise because I had to put my signature to the new partnership agreement and Trenton asked me to contact an important potential client that afternoon.

When I returned to the office, Lucinda reported that the publicity director of the company I had asked her to call on wished to have lunch with me in the near future.

<Lucinda, that's marvellous. How did you do it?'

<Just my natural charm. Plus the fact that James Clithero once played golf with Daddy.'

<Excellent.'

Once the business was up and running, Lucinda threw herself into her work with great enthusiasm. She made an excellent job of designing the interior of the new office, keeping strictly within budget. She complained of her father's meanness. But I was philosophical about it, knowing that in the long run it would be best for our fledgling company if we got into the habit of exercising strict financial control. The stark colours Lucinda chose for the walls, together with the Spartan furniture, created an image of up-beat modernity that suited our image. She had also bought very reasonably (out of her own funds) in Camden market some abstract sculptures that blended in beautifully. We got along famously and I praised her lavishly to boost her morale. Within a fortnight of start-up we gained our first contract. I took Lucinda out to dinner to celebrate.

If I have given due credit to my partner, I must also thank Mr Mouse for the staggering triumph that followed shortly afterwards. He gave me a brilliant idea for a series of commercials for catfood that proved irresistible to the directors of a company with over thirty-per-cent share of the UK market. They fell over themselves in their enthusiasm to take up my proposal. More of that later, because although I was gratified to have made such a good start, other problems were gnawing at me.

A new company is very vulnerable it can easily be crushed out of existence by competitors. Big agencies fight tooth and nail to hang onto their accounts. Only those who have started a new venture and carried it successfully through its teething stages can fully understand the anxieties one feels. I was in the office at seven o'clock every morning. Lucinda got in at eight and we set up a rigorous schedule for targeting leading companies and organizations. While Lucinda was out following up telephone contacts, I was busy organising production contracts for our first series of radio and TV ads. In the midst of my hectic round of meetings, I was aware all the time that I had not kept the promise I had made to visit my father. I told myself I would do so when my company car was delivered.

The war-time <biography' had in the meantime been almost forgotten. The new business took complete and absolute priority over everything else. I remembered a maxim: <You have to feed your horse before it will feed you,'

Helen's office was only minutes away and needing some art work in a hurry I decided to offer her the job. For some obscure reason I wanted her to know that I was no longer on the margins of society.

Curiously, this outweighed my concerns about the maintenance I might eventually be called upon to pay.

Her first question was: <Why haven't you been to see your father? He's very ill.'

<I've been very busy.'

<You are behaving swinishly'

<Okay, you've made your point. My car is being delivered this afternoon.'

<You had better make it quick, if you want to see him alive.'

Helen's cheeks flushed with anger and I suddenly felt horny. She had always seemed attractive when she was in a temper.

I said: <Okay. Okay. I'll go to see the old boy this evening.'

On the way back to my office I remembered that I hadn't asked her to see if there were anymore of my father's notebooks in the house. But now that I was back in my old profession, it no longer seemed to matter.

Was it luck, I asked George Trenton, or shrewdness that enabled him to retain his fortune, when so many others had lost theirs. He replied modestly that he thought it was luck but acknowledged that experience might have played a part. He had a thing about luck, having suggested from the beginning that we give the new agency the name ?Lady Luck", on the basis that people are drawn naturally towards those whom they believe to be favoured by good fortune. Lucinda had jumped at the suggestion.

George Trenton may have an extremely sensitive nose where money is concerned. But for sheer intuitive genius, he is no match for Mr Mouse. The cunning little fellow set the Lady Luck advertising agency firmly on the road to success by giving us an invaluable idea for a series of TV commercials. George Trenton had heard on the grapevine that Felicity Pet Foods were looking for a new agency. I told them that we had a brilliant concept in mind for a series of TV commercials on their product and I was prepared to give them first option. After an initial show of reluctance their publicity manager agreed to see me. The first hurdle was crossed. The next one was going to be much more difficult because, unfortunately, I had been bluffing I had no idea whatsoever for the new campaign. But I knew I could rely on my pet rodent to come up with something. Typically, he teased me by not putting in an appearance until the very day of the appointment. When at a late moment he emerged from wherever he keeps himself, he did me proud. I was on my way to work feeling frantic with worry, when I caught a glimpse of him in the driving mirror. He had a maniacal grin on his face, as though bursting to tell me the good news. The message came through like E-Mail.

There will be a series of ads based on an animated cartoon cat wearing exaggerated pink glasses designed to give a sympathetic, knowledgeable air. This most endearing feline Agony Aunt will shortly be seen on screen giving advice on various personal problems to characters with names like Desperate of Doncaster and Lovelorn of Liverpool. The ad always ends with Agony Aunt Cat licking her lips and saying: <But, of course, Felicity Cat Food solves all my personal problems.' Drawing on the endless variations of the human condition, Agony Aunt is guaranteed to capture a huge audience. The manufacturers are enormously enthusiastic and have signed a lucrative contract. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Mr Mouse. So does Stanley Brightwood, who stands to make a bomb out of the series.

On a more serious note, I visited my father recently. It was raining heavily as I parked my Cavalier in the car park. I threw a jacket over my head and raced up the ramp that leads to the front door. The matron led me upstairs her silence an eloquent denunciation of my neglect during the past few months.

I was struck by the marked deterioration in his condition. When I had last called he had been fairly alert and able to walk with the help of a stick. The frail figure I now saw was difficult to reconcile with my early memories of my virile, energetic dad. He was slumped in a low chair under a tartan rug, his face looking drawn and yellow. There were heavy brown pouches under his eyes. His face was deeply lined. The claw-like hand outside the rug clutching a silver-handled walking-stick was disfigured by liver spots. I tried to sound cheerful, as I said: <Hi, Dad. How're you getting along?'

He lifted his head up a little and motioned with his stick towards a chair.

I responded: <Don't worry. Your speech will come back in time. I'll do all the talking.'

He stared at me balefully.

<I'm sorry I haven't been in lately. I've had troubles with my business but it's all coming right now.'

I thought I detected a twisted smile on his face.

I said to humour him: <You're right. I should have taken up flying instead of going in for advertising.'

There was silence for a while, broken only by the sound of his heavy breathing.

I looked around the spacious room. Opposite the bed stood a large television set. A wide oak bookcase contained numerous books on Aviation and golf. He had retained a keen interest in the latter after his playing days were over. Comparative religion and philosophy were also represented. I was surprised to see some Hebrew prayer books that had once belonged to my great-grandfather. There was a hi-fi standing beside the bed. On the dressing-table stood a large wedding photograph. Staring at the refined features of my late mother, I suddenly remembered the other love of his life.

Trying to please him, I said: <I've been working on a book based on your war-time diaries. You had a very thrilling time.'

He gave a lopsided grimace.

I then said joshingly: <You seem to have been a great ladies' man in your day.'

He contrived to look both pleased and offended at this last remark.

<What happened to Ruth Fischer? You had a great thing going with her.'

I pretended not to notice when moisture suddenly appeared in his right eye. But eventually I took out my handkerchief and gently wiped the tear away. His jaw tightened as if he resented his own weakness.

I talked to him about the Atlanta Open Golf tournament currently being played and tried to arouse his interest in the prospects for the British players. I then told him about my business problems and asked his forgiveness for not coming to see him. He nodded, in acknowledgment. I thought it wise not to mention my impending divorce.

He looked at his wristwatch and pointed to the TV set. The afternoon's golf match was being broadcast. I switched on the set and much to my relief he became very absorbed in the tournament.

After remaining for half an hour, I shook the hand holding his stick and said: <Must go now, Dad. It's a long way to town and I have to be up early to get to work.'

He looked distressed and shook his head quite violently.

<No, really, I must go.'

He motioned with his stick and stared at me with the same kind of mute obstinacy as Ginger, my neighbour's cat.

I went to the door and called a nurse.

A big, buxom Irish girl with flaxen hair came in. I whispered to her: <It's time I went home but my father doesn't want me to go.'

She said in a resonant contralto: <Now, Alex, your son has to go. Was there anything you wanted to tell him?'

He pointed with his stick towards the bed.

The nurse said: <You need something from the case,'

My father nodded.

The girl knelt down and brought out a suitcase held together with leather straps. She began taking out various items: a photograph album, a bundle of letters, a practice putting device, some audio tapes. He continued shaking his head until she produced a large envelope. My father nodded and indicated that she should give it to me. Inside were two red notebooks, still with the original sixpenny price labels stuck on the covers.

I thanked my father and said: <Now I can finish the book.'

He rewarded me with a twisted smile.

The nurse accompanied me to the front door. I told her before leaving that I had made my father cry. <Don't worry,' she said. <Elderly gentlemen in his condition can easily be moved to tears.'

But I did worry. I am not as insensitive as some people, especially Helen, think I am.

Lunching with George Trenton at Wheeler's, St. James, I thoroughly enjoyed a lobster thermidor accompanied by a Premier Cru Chablis. It was followed by an exquisite bread pudding. George, looking extremely fit, says he owes his wellbeing entirely to Candy. They are now living together and intend to marry when his long-delayed divorce comes through. Asked how my divorce was going, I told him there were still a few loose ends to be tied up.

<Candy thinks you should go back to your wife.'

I shook my head.

<Have you thought of marrying again?'

<I'm too self-centred for marriage. So my wife tells me.'

George then withdrew a cigar from a leather case, lit up, apologised to the waiter for smoking in a non-smoking area but continued nevertheless. He said: <You know Lucinda is very fond of you. She admires your talent enormously. So do I for that matter. I like Agony Aunt Cat she's a howl. But, most important of all, having her own business has done wonders for my daughter. She's leading a perfectly normal life. And she's happy. That's all that concerns me.'

<We get along fine together. I think marriage would spoil it.'

<Well, I know I shouldn't interfere. But I just want to let you know that if you and she ever did decide to tie the knot, there would be a handsome settlement.'

I replied: <I'm deeply touched. But I'd probably make a hamus of it the second time around. I do really appreciate your trust in me. It's not easy...'

<It's not easy to commit yourself to a junky?'

<I shifted uncomfortably, and said: <She has shown she can stay clean. Let's hope it lasts.'

George Trenton looked sad and stroked his cleft chin thoughtfully.

<Would you like a brandy?'

<No thanks. I have an important client coming this afternoon. Better stay sober.'

George motioned to the waiter for the bill. As we waited, he repeated that he was well satisfied with the progress we were making at Lady Luck and added that while he liked to get a return on his money, his primary aim in launching it had been to improve Lucinda's health.

My thoughts were confused as I walked back to the office. My material circumstances have improved en-ormously. I now rent a comfortably-furnished flat in Maida Vale. I have a job in my old profession with the prospect of soon becoming a director. And I can't forget that it is all due to Candy. I would never have suspected that she had both the wit and the will to manipulate and organise matters for my benefit. What is more I'm pretty sure she is doing it against her own inclination, because I know damned well that she is still fond of me. There is only one problem I'm a little concerned about George's repeated hints that I should marry Lucinda. Not that the prospect of gaining a share of the Trenton fortune is totally unattractive. It is just that I would so very much prefer to marry Candy, who if George Trenton had his way and I married Lucinda, would become my step-mother-in law!

An aircraft passing overhead while I was walking up Regent Street reminded me of my father. I attended his funeral recently. I feel guilty for neglecting him during the last few months of his life and regret being unable to finish editing his diaries. I would have liked very much to have presented him with a neatly-bound version of his memoirs. I have been so busy of late there simply hasn't been time to examine the last two notebooks.

As I threaded my way through the crowds of shoppers, I imagined my father up in the clouds in a jet-propelled chariot winging his way towards a celestial airport. There, he would find safe haven from turbulence, fog, engine fires and hi-jacking and the other daily bugbears of airline pilots. But I realised that in thinking such a thing I was being foolish and sentimental. Like my father, I am incapable of swallowing the childish ideas of an after-life propounded by his war-time friend, Bud Fischer. Meanwhile, the floppy disk containing my edited account of his war-time experiences is in a drawer in my flat, gathering dust together with the two missing notebooks. It seems unlikely that I will ever have time to complete the task I started when the future looked so bleak.

My father once complained that his youth had been stolen by the war and his old age made wretched by my mother's premature death. What indeed is the point of life, I asked myself, if one is constantly dogged by such tragedy. Hoping to shake myself into a more cheerful frame of mind, I started jogging up Regent Street. As I ran, I consoled myself with the thought that my creation, Agony Aunt Cat, was amusing millions of people and might also be entertaining a fair number of tele-viewing cats, including Ginger. The latter thought made me laugh aloud.

Panting from the unaccustomed exercise, I soon slowed down to a walking pace. As I did so, I suddenly remembered that Mr Mouse had promised me that the word Agony was also relevant to my father's story. He seemed to have had a presentiment that the missing notebooks would be found.

I am very aware that the majority shareholders, George Trenton and Lucinda can fire me whenever it suits them to do so. Lucinda keeps begging me to move in with her. I have found the strength of will so far to resist. But I feel under increasing pressure. She's quite a likeable girl who seems to have inherited some of the shrewdness and businesslike qualities of her father. I can't fault her work although she does not understand the artistic and creative side, admitting herself that she has absolutely no talent for it.

Helen cried at my father's funeral, which touched me deeply. As we were about to leave after the interment he was buried in a Jewish cemetery I told her about the two notebooks hidden in my father's case. She asked if they contained anything interesting. I said: < I haven't had time to look at them yet.'

<You owe it to your father to finish what you started.'

<I was only doing it to keep myself busy.'

<If you don't finish it, I shall,' Helen announced crossly. And added as an afterthought before she walked away: <I should like to see them some time.'

Her attitude surprised me. It was not, after all, her father. But he had been very fond of her. She probably wants to read the diaries because she sees them as some kind of period drama the kind that are so popular on TV these days.

I telephoned Candy when I got home.

<Can we talk?' I enquired.

<Yes, Charlie. George is visiting his elderly mother. She doesn't like me, so I refused to go.'

<Why don't you steer clear of the whole family and marry me.'

<Don't be silly,' Candy admonished in her sexy contralto. <What's the big secret you want to discuss?'

<George keeps hinting that I should marry Lucinda.'

<You could do worse.'

<I could do a whole lot better marrying you.'

<Charlie, I don't know why we are having this conversation. If you don't want to marry Lucinda, don't. No one can force you.'

<George and Lucinda can fire me any time they like.'

<They are hardly likely to do that, when you are the driving force behind Lady Luck. You're being completely paranoid. Why don't you go back to Helen.'

<Don't be absurd. The divorce will be through any day now. Anyway, what makes you think she wants me back?'

<I just have an instinct for these things. Don't you realise I only want what is best for you.'

<You are a sentimental soul, Candy.'

<If I wasn't, I would kill myself.'

<Don't ever do that. I love you too much.'

<Charlie, please!... I want you to be practical and sensible and look after your own and your children's interests.'

<Do you realise that if you marry George and I marry Lucinda, I shall be your step son-in-law.'

<Stop talking rot, Charlie. If George keeps hinting that you should marry Lucinda, it's because he thinks a lot of you. He'd do anything to guarantee her happiness. But he wouldn't want to force you. Do you know what George loves above all?'

<Tell me.'

<Money. And that's the best guarantee you have of a stable future. He wants you to turn Lady Luck into one of the big players. He says the media and advertising is where all the big money is going in future. And he wants to build up a stake in it.'

<Does he have that much confidence in me?'

<He does, Charlie. And so do I.'

I blew a kiss into the mouthpiece and hung up.

After pouring myself out a large whiskey, I sat down in an armchair in the sitting-room and recalled that not so long ago I had been sitting in Clive Jarvis's flat, homeless, bankrupt and with no future. Now, I had a year's rent paid on my flat, a job and a car and prospects of restoring my fortunes in the advertising world. All thanks to Candy. Ironically, the surest way of returning to my former impoverished state would be to try to win her back.

The telephone rang. It was Lucinda.

I said: <Hi, partner. How's it going.'

<Rotten. I wish you'd come and see me.'

<I'd love to, honey. But I'm very busy.'

<Doing what?'

<I'm working on my father's diaries. You know the ones I told you about.'

<You said you had given it up.'

<I think I should finish the job out of respect for his memory.'

<You'll come tomorrow night?'

<Honey, why don't you find someone your own age to play with?'

<Because I love you.'

<I don't deserve it.'

<No you fucking well don't.'

<See you early in the morning, honey.'

I rang off.

What was I to do? If I broke off the relationship, it would affect our business partnership. She would be unable to cope with emotional turmoil. I was trapped.

I went to the sideboard and found the two notebooks. Suddenly it seemed like a good idea to finish what I had begun.

The two notebooks cover the period between the end of November 1944 and my father's release from the Royal Air Force. I scanned the diaries. Until May 1945, when the war ended, his squadron continued to strike enemy shipping and occasionally made ground attacks against the Germans retreating through Holland and Belgium. He writes about a tragic event:

<Even after the war ended we continued to suffer losses. Two of our pilots decided to celebrate our victory over the Germans by making a low pass over the airfield. They each feathered an engine to make it look more impressive, dived on the airfield from opposite directions and met catastrophically in mid-air. I watched in horror as the burning wreckage cascaded to the ground.'

<That episode took all the pleasure out of receiving the decoration that came my way. It struck me that those who had died including my friend Bud, had done so much more than I had to deserve one. Life lavishes rewards on the survivors simply because they have been lucky. Or cowardly. Or a mixture of both.'

I skimmed rapidly through the pages, trying to find out what had happened to Ruth Fischer. My father apparently wrote a succession of letters to the address she had given him in Montreal. He records in January 1945 that he was deeply depressed that his letters had not been acknowledged. In desperation, he telephoned Lilian Hartman.

There was an ominous silence at the other end of the line, when he mentioned the reason for his phone call, followed by: <Didn't you know that her ship was sunk by a U-Boat. A survivor says that she got onto a life-raft but it was lost in the confusion that followed the sinking.'

My father records his anguished feelings. He thought he was hardened to death. But this news took him to the limits of despair. He writes that it confirmed what he had always believed: that there is no solace to be found in religion and added: <The sea has not only taken my best friend but also his wife, a girl I adored. They must have both suffered the agony of waiting for a rescue that never came.'

The word AGONY leaped out of the page. Mr Mouse had kept his promise.

I have to confess in all honesty that when I was starved of ideas I used to give Helen a hard time. A blocked copy writer isn't easy to live with.

Recently, when I telephoned Helen in connection with the divorce, I mentioned the brilliant idea for catfood Mr Mouse had planted in my mind, she replied smoothly: <Yes, it's amazing how he comes up with the goods.'

It reminded me of the old days when she used to humour me by pretending to believe in my childish fantasies.

I replied enthusiastically: <This time he made one word do the work of two,'

<Rodents are so much cleverer than human beings'.

<He's such a clever little bugger. I'm sure he can make one word do the work of a thousand. Look at how mice have revolutionised the way we use computers. People couldn't manage without them. But no other mouse can quite do what my mouse can.'

I was so pleased with her acquiescence in my crazy talk that I didn't bring up the vexed question of access to the children. Later I phoned her again and we reached an agreement. Afterwards, I became engrossed again in the notebooks.

My father's plans for the future had for some time been based on his plan to go to Canada after the war and continue his courtship of Ruth Fischer. He seems to have been naively convinced that because they had slept together they would eventually marry. Ruth's more practical approach obviously hadn't put him off. Perhaps he thought their shared war-time experiences had made a special bond between them.

He wrote some time after he had learned that she had drowned: <Sometimes I have horrible nightmares in the course of which I murder Bud in order to have Ruth to myself. Is it possible to control one's dreams? The book on Sex I was given when I was a boy insisted that it was. But whether that is true or not, the important thing is that even if I could have prised Ruth away from Bud my code of honour would have prevented me from doing so. I am in despair now that she, too, has gone down into what my navigator called The Bloodless Abattoir. Both she and Bud were superior beings. They seemed to have everything one could wish for. Unhappily, they lacked the only thing that really matters: good fortune.

<Ruth's beauty and generous nature shone through all her bodily movements. I am sure she gave herself to me out of pity. It was the supreme experience of my life and literally made me feel reborn.

<I wrote to Bud's mother asking her to pass on my condolences to Ruth's parents. In the letter I mentioned the Foundation Ruth had proposed to set up in his honour and memory and commented, out of politeness, that it was sad that his papers had been lost.

<I was very surprised when Mrs. Fischer wrote back: ?I know that you and he argued a lot, because he mentioned it in his letters. Chaim <Bud' I don't know why everyone called him that had some very interesting ideas and although I would be the first to agree that he could be perverse and obstinate, he did make people sit up and listen. <If you have any anecdotes about him, and more especially if you can remember any of his thoughts during the time of your friendship, I would appreciate it if you would write them down in your next letter."

<I wanted to reply to Mrs Fischer but found I couldn't. I have written enough of Bud's ideas in my diaries. I simply cannot face the thought of writing about him and Ruth now that they are both dead. I just want to fly and get drunk, fly and get drunk and then repeat the process. At the time of writing I still haven't replied...'

Last night Lucinda and I went to a little restaurant in Fulham Palace Road and enjoyed generous portions of sirloin steak and delicious salad, followed by cabinet pudding. I drank mineral water, to encourage Lucinda to <slay the dragon and stay on the wagon,' as she puts in poetically. Unfortunately, her appetite for cigarettes seems to have grown prodigiously as a result. Back in her flat, embracing among the blue peacock cushions in her art nouveau sitting-room, I found her smoke-laden breath repellent and said peevishly: <Can't you lay off the ciggies.'

<Charlie!' she complained. <I'm having enough of a job giving up other things. The ciggies will come later I've been smoking practically all my life.'

<When did you start?'

<When I was eleven. We used to smoke in the school dorm after midnight. Barry used to bring us cigarettes.'

<Who's Barry?'

Lucinda gave a reminiscent giggle.

<He was a motor mechanic. He used to hide in the bushes and come and visit us late at night.'

Lucinda then told me about her first sexual experience. I interrupted her, to tell her that she had used the word <dick' seventeen times.

<So? What else do you want me to call it penis?'

<You don't have to keep repeating yourself.'

<What's got into you, Charlie. You've become such a prude all of a sudden.'

We quarrelled. I threatened to leave. She became very tearful and I eventually apologised.

<Okay, I won't use the dreaded word. Come here Tiger!'

She caught me by the hand and pulling me back onto the sofa enquired <I'm really not bad at making love, am I?'

<You're just that little teensy-weensy bit short of fantastic.'

<Oh, Charlie! Why do you have to keep putting me down!'

<I<m not. You are a very exciting girl. If you didn't have psychological problems, you'd be perfect.'

<What problems do I have?' She lit another cigarette and looked at me with avid expectancy.

<You smoke too much for one thing and you have low self esteem. The two things are probably related.'

<Quite right. My psychiatrist said that years ago when he was treating me for anorexia. He said it was because my older sister got all the praise and because my parents split up.'

<So why didn't he cure you?'

<You can't cure people of everything. For example, of being too short or the wrong sexual orientation. They are just unfortunate facts of life.' She blew out another wavering stream of blue smoke.

Wishing to take her out of her mood of pessimistic fatalism, I said: <It is possible to change some things it's possible to change your perceptions.'

She gave me a sceptical look.

<I'll prove it to you some time. In the meantime, why don't you try to stop smoking.'

<I will eventually when I<m completely cured of all the other things.'

<You'll make it, sweetheart. But in the meantime I'd prefer not to die of passive smoking.'

Lucinda ground out her cigarette in a finely-wrought Indian ashtray she had picked up in the Portobello Road market and remarked: <I've just learned that the best way to get people interested in sex is to watch other people making love.'

<Nothing new in that. Where did you read it?'

<GRUNT magazine.'

Lucinda pulled out a crudely-printed magazine from under a cushion and showed it to me. Under the title were the words: A magazine devoted to the Arts of Bonking and Suchlike. <You told me to keep an eye open for new and promising mags. This one has got a circulation of twenty-seven thousand already. It's only the second issue.'

I glanced through it and was mildly surprised to find the names of several journalists I knew.

<It won't last.'

<Why not?'

<Not enough humour.'

<Their advertising rates are very reasonable. Do you think we should enquire about some advance bookings?'

<It wouldn't suit any of our present clients.'

When we had finished discussing various prospective accounts, Lucinda took my tie in one hand, began idly stroking it with the other hand and remarked petulantly: <Why wouldn't you come here last night when I needed you.'

<I was studying my father's war diaries. Two of them only recently came to light.'

<What are they about?'

I told her about my father's love affairs.

<Perhaps your father hid them because he didn't want your mother to know how deeply he had been in love before.'

<Sounds possible.'

<I'd love to see them. What else is in them?'

<My father's friend who was killed during the war was some kind of a religious freak. He and my father argued a great deal. His wife, naturally, thought he was a genius. When his papers were lost at sea with Ruth Fischer, his mother asked my father if he could remember some of her son's ideas. Which rather put him on the spot because he disagreed with him on practically every issue.'

Lucinda pulled me towards her by my tie until I was within an inch of her face, an intense frown on her pale white freckled brow. I said huffily: <God, Lucinda. You're becoming a regular nympho.'

<Oh, shut up, Charlie. You've got such a fine conceit of yourself.' Releasing her hold on my tie, she said: <I'm just impatient to learn more about your father's wonderful story.'

<That's all there is to it.'

<So did your father remember his friend's ideas?'

<He had already noted them in his diaries. From what I can gather he never sent them.'

<Why not?'

<They were a bit, what you might say, off the wall. Anyway, I doubt if I shall bother with the diaries any more.'

<Oh, but you must.'

<Why, for God's sake?'

I was disconcerted when Lucinda replied: <Because they are all that's left of someone. And if your father recorded his friend's ideas in his diary, they must have been worth saving. And you are now the only person in the world who can ensure that this is done.'

<It's not my responsibility.'

<Charlie, you disappoint me,' Lucinda said suddenly. She pursed her lips, took a packet of cigarettes out of her bag and then abruptly put them back again. She then added crisply: <You have the soul of a louse.'

<Who said a louse has a soul?' I grabbed her and drew her towards me. <Who said anybody has a soul?'

Lucinda stiffened in my grasp. She went on: <Can't you see that you have a duty to preserve something of the past. This man died for his country, so he deserves to have his ideas saved, even if they were a bit wild. They might even help someone like me, a druggy, who is looking for a way out. You know what they say once a druggy always a druggy.'

<What makes you think that?' I enquired irritably.

<My doctor told me.'

<No, I mean what makes you think that the second-hand thoughts of someone who died fifty years ago can help anyone living today. That sounds like a load of crap to me.'

Lucinda stared at me her pale blue eyes narrowing. Then she suddenly said precisely and deliberately and with great coldness: <Why don't you go back to your wife.'

<What on earth are you talking about?'

<What I said. If you don't possess enough common humanity to recognise a clear obligation when you see one, then piss off.'

<Hey, wait a minute, Lucinda. I didn't say I wouldn't finish them I've got Lucky Lady to think about now. But if my father didn't agree with his friend's ideas and I don't either, why should I bother to record them? Do please tell me that.'

<Because both Ruth and his mother thought they were worth recording. I wish I could see the diaries.'

Shaken by her quite unexpected outburst, I said: <Okay, I'll bring them here next time I come and we'll both go through them and find out if there's anything worth keeping.'

Lucinda nodded. She reached for her cigarettes and then very deliberately and looking immensely sad, lit up.

Her spirited opposition had strangely aroused me. I embraced her. She suddenly became limp in my arms and whispered something unintelligible. I took the cigarette out of her mouth, carried her into the adjoining bedroom and laid her gently on the pink flowered bedspread. I was undressing, when she called out: <Charlie, darling, quickly.' She began moaning, pulsating and tossing her head restlessly from side to side.

I said: <I won't be long.'

She replied contemptuously: <It's not you I need, Charlie. I need a fix.'

Looking at the notebooks and my father's logbook the following evening, I came across the photograph of the shrine to a kamikaze pilot I had taken some years before while attending an advertising conference. It brought back memories of a pleasant drinking session in the bar of the Tokyo Prince hotel. The conversation had turned to the subject of propaganda. One of the Japanese delegates, Takua Fujitsu, quoted the old saying that Truth is the first casualty in war, adding that it was probably wartime propaganda that had persuaded his uncle to make a kamikaze attack on an American ship. I mentioned that my father had been on an anti-shipping squadron, adding that I doubted if he would have been willing to perform such a self-sacrificing deed. Takua said he admired his uncle but didn't think he would have volunteered.

We drank a great deal of Suntory whiskey. Afterwards, he insisted on taking me to his home to show me a little shrine honouring his late uncle. His apartment was claustrophobically small. I made suitable sympathetic noises concerning his late uncle and before leaving obtained his permission to take a photograph.

Reading the diaries has reminded me again of my Jewish ancestry. Curiously, in some ways I resent not having been brought up as a Jew. I might have welcomed the extra challenge.

I noticed in this morning's newspaper an article which reported that during the Second World War, when the Germans were rounding up the Jews in Eastern Europe for despatch to the death camps, the Japanese ambassador to Lithuania, Sempo Sugihara, issued on his own initiative five thousand exit visas to Jews in Vilnius, enabling them to escape the gas chambers. Subsequently he was sacked for disobeying orders. His memory, it was reported, had been honoured by a Jewish organization in a ceremony in Toronto. There is a Jewish saying quoted by Bud Fischer to the effect that the world is only saved from falling into chaos by the actions of a few righteous individuals. Sempo Sugihara was obviously one of them. I then conjured up a mental picture of Buddhist monks standing outside a sunlit monastery. One of them says: <Sample Blogg's Soup and you can become one of the enlightened few.' I decided to report this to Lucinda as an example of how my mind constantly seeks advertising material, finding it in the most unlikely places. She needs something to cheer her up. The poor girl seems to be on a downward path but there doesn't appear to be anything I can do about it.

Feeling a bit depressed about this, and by the realisation that most of the profit made by Lady Luck would be going to Lucinda and George Trenton, I telephoned Candy and asked her to have lunch with me at the Savoy Grill. When she replied that it might be indiscreet, I replied sharply: <What harm can it do now? Everything has changed. You're living with George. I'm screwing his daughter. There's no reason why we shouldn't be friends... Anyway, there's no need for George to know.'

I booked a room at the Savoy, charged it up to the business and gained a certain perverse satisfaction from the knowledge that ultimately George Trenton would be picking up the tab.

Candy's beauty turned a lot of heads, as she entered the foyer. I kissed her, inhaled deeply of her perfume and led her to the bar. I noticed a large square-cut emerald ring on her left hand, but managed to resist rebuking her for falling into Trenton's honeyed trap.

We had a couple of dry martinis. I tipped the barman to make them extra strong.

We chatted for a while. I asked about one of Lucinda's sisters who had just had a baby and remarked: <That will make you an impossibly young step-grandmother.'

Candy gave me an amused look and asked after Lucinda. I replied: < She's great at the old sales pitch and she's a good organizer.'

<I'm glad it has worked out so well.'

She crossed her legs and gave me a reproving look when I glanced at them and mimed rapturous appreciation.

I said: <Candy, darling, I asked you to come today to show appreciation for helping me to get back on my feet again. I'd be finished if it weren't for you.'

Her face lighting up, she said: <I'm so pleased, Charlie. I really am. There is only one other thing that's bugging me...'

<What's that?'

<Breaking up your marriage.'

<For the thousandth time I keep telling you that Helen and I would have split anyway, even if you hadn't come along.'

<Not necessarily,' she said emphatically. <Through living with George, I've discovered what makes a marriage.'

<Self interest?'

She frowned.

<Don't be so cynical, Charlie. It's putting down deep roots. I did you a very bad turn when I slept with you.'

<Don't talk nonsense, Candy. Please. It was losing all my money that ruined everything. Plus, of course, the stupidity of whoever it was gossiped about us. Let's go in for lunch.'

We had a good meal. I ordered a vintage claret. I told her I had high hopes of recapturing the Simpson's Jam account and we discussed some of the rapid changes taking place in the advertising world. Afterwards, I said earnestly: <I want to discuss Lucinda, so I've booked a private room where we can talk without having to worry about the paparazzi. Anything concerning George has a habit of getting into the newspapers.'

Candy, her face a little flushed from the Martinis, betrayed no sign of suspicion as she followed me into the lift.

However, when we entered the bedroom, she said: <I hope I hope you don't think I'm going to bed with you, Charlie Colgate'

<Of course not. But it would be a rather nice thing to do for old time's sake.'

Candy sat in an armchair and asked cheerfully: <Charlie, what do you want from this world? You're screwing George's daughter. I do believe you want to screw his fiancée as well. Aren't you ever satisfied?'

<I won't be until I persuade you to leave him and come and live with me. I promise to marry you as soon as the divorce comes through. That could be any day now.'

I went dramatically down on my knees in front of her chair, took her hand and gazed up at her longingly.

She smiled sadly and said: <Get up, Charlie. Don't you ever stop acting. You should be thoroughly grateful that you're on the up and up again. Apologise to Helen for being a randy old sod. That might just do a bit of good.'

I leaned over until my face was close to hers and said earnestly: <But it's you I love, Candy-floss. I want to eat you all up.'

Candy said impatiently: <Don't give me all that shit, Charlie. We're both too old for it... Well, maybe you're not. Anyway, you got me up here on the pretext of wanting to discuss Lucinda.'

I nodded solemnly. <She hasn't been doing too badly. But I discovered recently that she is friendly with a guy who's done time for drug trafficking. She's on the downward path again.'

Candy looked sad. She shook her head and said: <It'll kill George. She was always his favourite daughter. Why don't you move in with her? It might help if you kept an eye on her.'

<Christ, one moment you're telling me to go back to my wife and the next moment you want me to live with a dopehead. Don't you care at all for morality.'

For no apparent reason Candy started crying little sniffles at first, which soon developed into great heaving sobs. I helped her stand up and kissed her. My face became wet from her tears. Her knees buckled and we both fell into an untidy heap on the bed, where she continued to cry inconsolably. She put up no resistance as I undressed her. We savaged each other in a despairing fury of love-making. It was as though our affair had never been interrupted.

And then to my intense surprise, she dressed hurriedly and swore almost hysterically that she never wanted to see me again.

<But darling, I pleaded. <You did like it. And you do love me.'

She made rapid repairs to her face and said earnestly when she was ready to go, in a way I had never heard her speak before: I'm sorry we did that. It was a big mistake.'

She grabbed her bag and ran into the corridor. I caught her up and whispered urgently: <Don't let's part like this.'

<Charlie, for God's sake, you know as well as I do that if we carry on like this we'll wreck everything.'

<What about our love?'

<You're a selfish bum, Charlie. Go and ask your children how they feel about you and you'll realise what an utter shit you have been.'

Her beauty turned heads again as she walked through the foyer. She looked fretful as the taxi the commissionaire flagged down for her pulled away.

I started walking towards my car, hoping my little indiscretion would not have consequences as dire as the last time we had been seen together in a hotel. Oddly, getting revenge on my rival had not been quite as gratifying as I thought it would be.