The Tunnel by Eric Williams

a friend, and when he was shot after breaking his leg at a stone wall Peter had been miserable for days …
    And then the war. The early days of mastering once again all that he had forgotten of trigonometry. The intricacies of navigation. The long weary months of sitting in a schoolroom, treated as a child again. The first thrill of navigating his own aircraft across country at night. The close companionship of a bomber squadron.
    He remembered his first meeting with his crew. Seven men, all trained on different stations, unknown to one another; meeting to form a partnership to take them through thirty trips over enemy territory. He remembered the early suspicions, the wary summing-up of each other’s capabilities. In spite of the fact that he was the only officer in the crew they had soon settled down and become good friends, working well together and surviving twenty-four of their thirty trips. He wondered again where the rest of them were; whether any had succeeded where he had failed.
    Of Pat, his wife, now dead, he would not think. The hurt was too new, himself too vulnerable …
    He thought instead of his friends on the squadron. Of Ginger Grant – good old Ginger who had tried so hard to hide the schoolboy behind the huge Bomber Command moustache and frightfully battered service cap. The cap had looked ‘operational’ from the very beginning. It was said that the day Ginger received his first uniform he had tied the cap into a ball with string, and left it in water in the washbasin all night ‘to make it look operational, old boy.’ Ginger had certainly got operational all right but, even when he was a squadron leader with the DFC and bar, you could still see the marks in his cap where he had tied it with string and left it in water in the washbasin.
    Ginger had been an enthusiast with a zest for the small things in life. Perhaps he had known that he too was soon to be killed. He had met a girl at a dance in Cambridge – ‘perfectly wizard, old boy – absolute corker!’ They had danced to a tune called This Is No Laughing Matter, and the next day he had gone into Cambridge to buy the gramophone record. He had brought it back in an envelope tied with paper ribbon, put it on the radiogram, turned the control knob to repeat, and played it continually for half an hour, sitting on the lid of the radiogram, twirling his enormous moustache and defying everyone to come and turn him off.
    Then there had been the day when Ginger had got drunk in Cambridge. Missing the last train home, he had slept on the platform until the milk train at four a.m. which brought him to the local station. Finding no transport there, he knocked up the stationmaster and asked where he could sleep. It was raining, and Ginger felt a hangover looming up. The stationmaster allowed him to sleep in the signal box, and Ginger bedded himself down among the mass of brightly-shining switches and levers. His last impression before falling asleep must have been of all those switches and levers round his head, looking rather like the cockpit of his Stirling. Hardly had he fallen into the first deep beer-induced slumber when a train was signalled by the violent ringing of a bell above his head. Jerked out of his sleep, and furious at the insistent clanging of the bell, his only sleepy reaction was to stop the row at all costs. This he endeavoured to do by pulling and pushing every lever and switch he could see. It was hours before they got the line free …
    Soon after that Ginger had ‘bought it’ over Duisburg. Peter had watched the take-off; seen Ginger, fooling to the last, with his gigantic red moustache sticking out of the top of his oxygen mask, take his aircraft away for the last time. No one had ever heard what had become of him.
    Every morning the gaoler brought the broom into the cell and every morning Peter refused to sweep, until at last the cell got so dirty that he had to sweep it in self-defence. Instead of being triumphant, the guard