Start With a Bang?

No.

So much is written these days about starting off novels with some outrageous hook. Something that grabs the reader's attention immediately, because heavens to Murgatroyd, we all know that the modern reader has no attention span.

Or do we?

I refuse to underestimate my reader. And what's with all this rushing? In the opening chapter, 1939, I want to woo you. Get to know you a little and make a few introductions to my characters, before we get down to it. Throw some humour your way and share some goodwill.

Warm up.

And yet, there is a bang. It's in 1940, is all. After a brief trip through 1939, just enough to get you settled into the saddle. It's a long ride, after all. And here, online, I'll post that bang so that folks who discover TMWWMMS here can be assured that there's plenty of action.

I'm just old-fashioned enough to believe that the main event is sweeter if there's a little lighthearted romance first.

*****

1940 – The Battle of Britain

The guttural beat of twin aeroplane engines grew louder. It wasn’t a Heinkel; their unsynchronised engines had an unmistakable and oddly disconcerting thrum-thrum-thrum sound. This one was British.

The pilots of 210 Squadron were lounging around dispersal waiting to be called for a show, if one ever materialized. As the engine noise grew louder some of them stood, others just turned their heads a bit. Suddenly there was a bang, and only one engine sound continued on after it.

Whittaker leaned in towards the noise and squinted.

“It’s a Blenheim,” he asserted.

Sure enough, it was, and no one could figure out how he knew that so long before the rest of them. It must have been over bombing something in France and if it was approaching Biggin Hill, a fighter station, then it was in trouble and looking to land anywhere it could.

The British bomber came into full view. The pilot was blipping his starboard engine. The port one was now dead, prop feathered, and a stream of petrol was pouring out of it into the sky like a broad brushstroke of dilute white watercolours. The landing gear was down but the left strut was at an odd angle, incomplete in its track towards locking open. The bombardier had just radioed that their gunner was wounded; the pilot was OK but “Rather too busy at the moment to chat; I’ll put him on after we pancake.”

As the twin-engine bomber came closer they could see that the rudder had largely been shot off as well. Here was this chap, trying to land his six-ton machine that he couldn’t steer, with all its power pulling from the starboard engine. As if that wasn’t enough, his machine was about to explode at any moment due to its massive petrol leak.

Somehow he made a curving descent amongst an alternating series of blips and silences and lined himself up as best he could at the far end of the runway, making the attempt to touch down with as much of the field before him as he could, this, after all, being a fighter base, its runways considerably shorter than he was used to. As soon as his machine touched down it began to disintegrate. First the left tyre blew out and then the left landing gear collapsed upwards against the wing. The wingtip scraped along the ground and, with that, the propeller dug into the soil and the entire left wing was ripped off the fuselage, flipping along separately next to the main body of the machine. The fuel was soaking the grass as it spewed everywhere. It caught fire.

The fuselage and remaining right wing of the Blenheim skittered to a stop and the pilot and bombardier jumped out of their cockpit and went straight for the hatch they’d have to open if they were to rescue their waist gunner from being roasted alive when their mount blew up.

Rescuing a wounded man from a burning wreck would have made the newspapers in peacetime, and it might have been hard to find men and women who were up to the task. Now, however, things were different, as evidenced by the 210 Squadron pilots and ground crew who went dashing towards the twisted, smoking mass of metal in the middle of their runway. There was no questioning what to do; everyone just pitched in. The pilot and bombardier managed, however, to open the hatch before anyone else arrived, slip around a bit on the oil and blood that now was splattered about inside their once-clean machine, and pull their wounded crewmate down onto the grass. Just as they had gathered him up and moved a few paces towards the ambulance that was racing at them, their plane finally exploded, although so much petrol had been misted across the hops fields surrounding the air base that the detonation was more of a pop than a blast.

Less than half an hour later the pilot and bombardier were sipping tea in the ready room with 210 Squadron, swapping flying tales as if they were discussing a cricket match. And their waist gunner was off in hospital being treated for non-life-threatening injuries by the capable surgeon Dr. Esmond Ellingham. As soon as this young airman woke from anaesthesia he started flirting with his two nurses, trying to set up a date in London for the first day he would be up and walking about again, which he expected would be in under a fortnight, far less than the two months that the renowned Dr. Ellingham had prognosticated.

Their sangfroid wasn’t affectation; it was not line-shooting. These fliers truly didn’t like to make a fuss.