The next day the skies cleared and once again we saw the mountains. We did a patrol over the troops which were already retreating slowly towards Thermopylae, and we met some Messerschmitts and Ju-87s dive-bombing the soldiers. I think we got a few of them, but they got Sandy. I saw him going down. I sat quite still for thirty seconds and watched his plane spiralling gently downwards. I sat and waited for the parachute. I remember switching over my radio and saying quietly, ‘Sandy, you must jump now. You must jump; you’re getting near the ground.’ But there was no parachute.
When we landed and taxied in, there was Katina, standing outside the dispersal tent with the Doc; a tiny shrimp of a girl in a dirty print dress, standing there watching the machines as they came in to land. To Fin, as he walked in, she said, ‘Tha girisis xana.’
Fin said, ‘What does it mean, Pericles?’
‘It just means “You are back again,” ’ and he smiled.
The child had counted the aircraft on her fingers as they took off, and now she noticed that there was one missing. We were standing around taking off our parachutes and she was trying to ask us about it, when suddenly someone said, ‘Look out. Here they come.’ They came through a gap in the hills, a mass of thin, black silhouettes, coming down upon the aerodrome.
There was a scramble for the slit trenches and I remember seeing Fin catch Katina round the waist and carry her off with us, and I remember seeing her fight like a tiger the whole way to the trenches.
As soon as we got into the trench and Fin had let her go, she jumped out and ran over on to the airfield. Down came the Messerschmitts with their guns blazing, swooping so low that you could see the noses of the pilots sticking out under their goggles. Their bullets threw up spurts of dust all around and I saw one of our Hurricanes burst into flames. I saw Katina standing right in the middle of the field, standing firmly with her legs astride and her back to us, looking up at the Germans as they dived past. I have never seen anything smaller and more angry and more fierce in my life. She seemed to be shouting at them, but the noise was great and one could hear nothing at all except the engines and the guns of the aeroplanes.
Then it was over. It was over as quickly as it had begun, and no one said very much except Fin, who said, ‘I wouldn’t have done that,
ever; not even if I was crazy.’
That evening Monkey got out the squadron records and added Katina’s name to the list of members, and the equipment officer was ordered to provide a tent for her. So, on 11 April 1941, she became a member of the squadron.
In two days she knew the first name or nickname of every pilot and Fin had already taught her to say ‘Any luck?’ and ‘Nice work.’
But that was a time of much activity, and when I try to think of it hour by hour, the whole period becomes hazy in my mind. Mostly, I remember, it was escorting the Blenheims to Valona, and if it wasn’t that, it was a ground-strafe of Italian trucks on the Albanian border or an SOS from the Northumberland Regiment saying they were having the hell bombed out of them by half the aircraft in Europe.
None of that can I remember. I can remember nothing of that time clearly, save for two things. The one was Katina and how she was with us all the time; how she was everywhere and how wherever she went the people were pleased to see her. The other thing that I remember was when the Bull came into the mess-tent one evening after a lone patrol. The Bull was an enormous man with massive, slightly hunched shoulders and his chest was like the top of an oak table. Before the war he had done many things, most of them things which one could not do unless one conceded beforehand that there was no difference between life and death. He was quiet and casual and when he came into a room or into a tent, he always looked as though he had made a mistake and hadn’t really meant to come in at all. It was getting dark and we were sitting round in the tent playing shove-halfpenny when the Bull came in. We knew that he had just landed.
He glanced around a little apologetically, then he said, ‘Hello,’ and wandered over to the bar and began to get out a bottle of beer.
Someone said, ‘See anything, Bull?’
The Bull said, ‘Yes,’ and went on fiddling with the bottle of beer.
I suppose we were all very interested in our game of shove-halfpenny because no one said anything else for about five minutes. Then Peter said, ‘What did you see, Bull?’
The Bull was leaning against the bar, alternately sipping his beer and trying to make a hooting noise by blowing down the neck of the empty bottle.
Peter said, ‘What did you see?’
The Bull put down the bottle and looked up. ‘Five S-79s,’ he said.
I remember hearing him say it, but I remember also that our game was exciting and that Fin had one more shove to win. We all watched him miss it and Peter said, ‘Fin, I think you’re going to lose.’ And Fin said, ‘Go to hell.’
We finished the game, then I looked up and saw the Bull still leaning against the bar making noises with his beer bottle.
He said, ‘This sounds like the old Mauretania coming into New York harbour,’ and he started blowing into the bottle again.
‘What happened with the S-79s?’ I said.
He stopped his blowing and put down the bottle.
‘I shot them down.’
Everyone heard it. At that moment eleven pilots in that tent stopped what they were doing and eleven heads flicked around and looked at the Bull. He took another drink of his beer and said quietly, ‘At one time I counted eighteen parachutes in the air together.’
A few days later he went on patrol and did not come back.
Shortly afterwards Monkey got a message from Athens. It said that the squadron was to move down to Elevsis and from there do a defence of Athens itself and also cover the troops retreating through the Thermopylae Pass.
Katina was to go with the trucks and we told the Doc he was to see that she arrived safely. It would take them a day to make the journey. We flew over the mountains towards the south, fourteen of us, and at two thirty we landed at Elevsis. It was a lovely aerodrome with runways and hangars; and best of all, Athens was only twenty-five minutes away by car.