The relative lull here has at least given us the opportunity to properly repair all the holes on the airfield and attempt to restore the telephone lines which had been completely destroyed by the bombs on September 5. I even managed to wipe the dust off my violin which I haven’t managed to play for a while because I’ve either been working on George’s plane, filling in holes on the runway or talking to Joyce.

It was only yesterday evening though, that I plucked up the courage to ask Joyce what I have been meaning to ask her for a little while. George had returned after claiming the scalp of a Junkers 88 bomber and once I had looked over the Merlin and had put my tools away and cleaned myself up, I went to find Joyce. We went for a walk in the twilight, through the fields around Biggin Hill. We talked about the attacks on London and something I had discovered only that day; that the Germans were using inferior fuel to our 100-octane variety, which was giving our engines the edge over theirs. Joyce seemed to particularly like this story and I felt that the time was right. We opened a gate into a field with just a solitary cow mooching around in it. A few birds tweeted in the darkening dusk. I held Joyce’s right hand in mine and dropped onto one knee.

‘What are you doing, Frank?’ she said, laughing.

‘Joyce, I’m so glad I met you. I’m not really much of a man for the ladies but I think I’ve found the most perfect lady in the world . . . ‘

‘Frank!’

‘Will you please let me finish, Joyce?’

‘Get up, Frank,’ she said, pulling at my hand.

‘I’m asking you to marry me,’ I said, with dread in my heart like shards of ice.

‘Will you wait until we’ve got out of this field first, Frank: there’s a bull running towards us!’

I looked over my shoulder and saw that the solitary cow I had seen was indeed a bull and that it was gathering pace as it moved toward us.

‘Run!’ I shouted.

We ran for the gate and jumped onto it. I got over first and dragged Joyce over behind me just at the moment that the bull skidded to a halt, bringing up a cloud of dust. It snorted and bucked its head and looked me straight in the eye.

‘Yes,’ I heard Joyce say.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Mr Frank Edwards, I would like to be your wife.’

I gave the bull a triumphant wink and kissed Joyce on the lips.

I was up early this morning to get George’s plane ready for dawn patrol. When I saw him I told him what had happened and I confided in him. ‘I’m a man with few friends, Mr Sheridan, but I’ve always found you a very decent, kind and generous chap. So I know that this may not be “the done thing”; me an engineer and you an officer pilot and all, but it would be a great honour for me if you would be the best man at our wedding.’

‘Of course,’ says George, ‘It’ll be my pleasure. And stop calling me Mr Sheridan. It’s George or nothing.’

Before George went off on his 48 hours leave, he said that he didn’t think he’d still be here were it not for the work that me and Alf and Billy had done on his plane.

‘I’ve been lucky to be flying the fastest, smoothest kite in the entire outfit,’ he said, ‘all the other chaps are jealous and wish that they were in it instead of me. So I want to congratulate you on your hard work. Thank you.’ It was a proud day for all of us.

George even lent me his car a couple of times before he went off, and I drove Joyce up to Sevenoaks for some supper and we parked in a quiet place in the country lanes on the way back in the black-out and had a kiss.

‘I like knowing that if the engine didn’t start again, you’d know what to do with it,’ Joyce said to me after I had turned it off and we were sitting next to each other in the suddenly quiet darkness. ‘That’s a good quality in a man. So many of those pilots might know how to shoot up an enemy plane but they’d get lost in an engine. Half of them wouldn’t know a crankcase from a gasket.’

Now, if most people went to the cinema to watch a film I don’t expect this is the kind of dialogue they’d like to listen to, but it works for me. I’m glad I met a fellow lover of engines, rather than a soft girl that always wants to watch romantic films or fall asleep on your arm before you’ve barely said hello.

These snatched moments of pleasure are made more intense, it seems to me, by the diabolical conditions we are living our lives in for most of the time. The fact that a bomb might get any of us at any point has made me think much harder about this romance than I think I might have done in peacetime. I ought, I think, to do the right thing as they say. I ought to ask her to marry me. I’d feel relieved to know that if something happens to me at least I have told Joyce how I feel about her and made a commitment to her for the rest of my life. I don’t know how much time we have, after all.

But to be truthful, I am more nervous about the idea of asking Joyce to marry me than the prospect of a bomb hitting me. At least the chances are if a bomb hit me then it would be over very quickly. The suffering I face if Joyce says no could last for a lifetime. I’ve no idea what she’ll say. I’ve never been very good at reading what other people are likely to do after all. So maybe, Frank, this is the worst idea you’ve ever had.

‘Bugger that,’ he said when he heard the news, and I’ve never seen him so angry. ‘Do they think that I’ve stayed here all summer fighting and watching my friends get killed one by one, just so that I can bugger off on a holiday to Wales at the end of it?’

‘I don’t suppose there’s much you can do about it,’ I said, ‘they’ll be bringing a new squadron in to replace you.’

‘Then I’ll fly with them,’ said George. ‘I’m not moving from here until we’ve beaten them back. Otherwise what is the point? I’ll finish what I started.’

‘With the greatest respect, Mr Sheridan,’ I said, ‘even the best of us need a rest at some point. And you being a married man, it’s more than just you that’ll get hurt if something happens to you.’

‘Listen, Frank. I’ve been here long enough to know that I’m a bloody good pilot and I also know what it takes to stay alive in the air. If I took a rest now I’d just go soft and it would be like running away. I’m simply not prepared to do it. And that’s that.’

I doubted whether he would be allowed to stay but after a day of argument and negotiation with the Squadron Leader and the Group Captain, he came back to the hangar in triumph.

‘I’m staying,’ he said grinning, ‘and you’re staying with me, Frank. Together, we’ll show them what we’re made of: the stubborn pilot ace and his violin-playing mechanic, the strangest duo in the RAF.’

For the first time since I’d known him I wondered whether George was perfectly sound in his mind. He seemed so elated by this turn of events that I genuinely began to wonder whether he wants to stay to fight, or whether he wants to stay until he dies. Maybe they’re one and the same thing. But I still have faith that he is, as he put it, a ‘bloody good pilot.’

Biggin Hill was bombed on August 18. It was a surprise attack. The bombers had come in low to avoid being detected. Just before I started the engine on George’s Hurricane, we could hear the distant hum of the bombers coming in. The pilots then rushed to get airborne before the attack was upon us. They made it up into the air just as on the ground we got first sight of the incoming aircraft; nine Dornier bombers flying at just 100 feet above the ground. The AA guns opened up on them as I sprinted for the shelter. I heard the first bombs exploding somewhere to the east but then the second wave of bombers were overhead and as they dropped their load on the runway and MT sheds next to me, I was flung to the floor by the force of an explosion.

I felt a sudden sharp pain in my left leg and lost consciousness. I wasn’t sure how long it was until I opened my eyes again but when I did I was covered in dust and rubble from the ruined shed and I could feel the heat of a fire on my face. I looked around and could tell that the shed just a hundred feet away was an inferno too painful to look at. I needed to get away from the heat but as I tried to stand my leg hurt and I felt dazed from the blast. Instead I started to crawl through the rubble away from the fire, but I soon blacked out again.

The next thing I knew George was giving me a fireman’s lift across the airfield.

‘I thought you were flying,’ I muttered to him.

‘I was, old chap, and now I’m back. Glad they haven’t smashed up the runway too much. Or my engineer.’

The doctor took a look at me and said I was concussed and needed some rest. But he also took a tiny fragment of shrapnel out of my thigh and said I’d been extremely lucky: it had missed my artery by just a fraction of an inch. Sadly the AA gunner from my home town of Solihull was not as lucky as me; he was killed by a bomb blast.

Joyce came to see me yesterday and told me that I was her hero.

‘Why is it that injured men always look so handsome?’ she asked.

‘I expect it’s because you feel you’re in control when we’re like this,’ I said with a smile.

Hopefully I’ll be out of bed tomorrow: George is sharing an engineer with another pilot at the moment and I expect his plane is suffering as a result. He’ll need me to be fit and well as soon as I can be, and I’m sure I can drag a limp along with me when I’m looking at the engine.

I’m now resigned to fitting new planes on a regular basis as it seems the idea that one plane will last for long in this battle is stupid. Even when their planes are hit, most of the pilots still survive, but I wonder how long that can go on. At some point the likelihood seems to be that George will get it in some way, either killed or badly injured.

That’s what happened to George’s friend Henry, who baled out over the sea with awful burns around the same time that George was crashing his plane at Hawkinge. I heard one pilot saying that you had at most eight seconds to get out of a plane when it was on fire. That way, he said, you might fly again, even though you would also be terribly burned and scarred for life. A second longer and you would never fly again. A further second and you were dead. Henry got out in time to save his life but nobody yet knows whether he will ever fly again.

George was grim-faced when he heard the news and he told me to check before every flight that his cockpit cover was well-oiled so that it could be opened cleanly and easily. But that’s all he said. He didn’t express any sadness about his friend or that he had any fear of burning himself, though I expect it’s the thing that all the pilots must fear the most. To explode in the air or plunge into the sea, to be shot in the heart or collide with an enemy plane are all things that a pilot might reasonably think about; but the mind must rebel against the thought of being burned alive.

I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely had time to pick up my violin, let alone see anything of Joyce or complete my clockwork Hurricane. Instead, I’ve been drinking as much tea as I can get my hands on, working my way through bread and jam sandwiches, and spending the rest of the time hard at work on engines. It feels like what I was born to do to be honest, and I’d be enjoying it if it wasn’t for the fact that I worry about whether the pilots are going to come back or not.

He arrived at Biggin Hill in the evening. A journalist from London had driven him back. I was pleased to see him uninjured but also felt bad to lose the plane – a plane I had devoted so many hours of hard work to, all for it to be lost to the sea.

The following day we had a new plane for George to fly and me and Alf both started putting our stamp on her with some of the modifications we had tested on the previous Hurricane. George flew her that same afternoon but then we stayed up all night for me to tune the engine and for Alf to file down the rivets as he had with the previous plane.

Then, for a few days the weather closed in and it seemed strangely still in the haunting mist and fog. Rumours were flying around about the German engines that had been tested from downed aircraft. I heard that the 109s have got fuel-injected Daimler-Benz engines, whereas ours have a float carburettor. I imagine that makes the German planes more resilient to stalling.

The poor weather gave us an opportunity to complete all the changes we needed to make to the new Hurricane. Joyce popped by a couple of times to say hello, but I told her to stop as Alf and Billy just smirk and wink at each other whenever she’s there and afterwards they make lewd jokes. However, even though they’re in bad taste, they do make me smile.

‘Come to inspect the old engine, has she Frank?’ says Alf, with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth, ‘to see if the fuel pump’s working?’

‘Popping by to see if those pistons need oiling, eh?’ says Billy.

And so on. It’s always been like this, ever since I’ve been at school. The others tend to gang up on me a bit, and it’s even worse because they’re both Londoners and I’m what they call a Brummie (even though I’m from Solihull, which is actually closer to Coventry). But what’s different from school is that there feels like there’s an underlying good humour and respect to their teasing whereas when I was a kid the attacks felt more vicious.

Out of the three of us I’m the closest to George. And in the foggy days of August 3^rd and 4^th, he spoke to me about what had happened to him, how the farmer had pointed a gun at him when he landed in his field and how he was driven back to Biggin Hill by the journalist, who also interviewed him.

‘The thing is, Frank old chap, I didn’t see him coming. But I suppose that the weaver has the hardest and most dangerous job of all.

‘Anyway, when is Ralph’s car getting taken away? It’s getting to me the way my friend’s car is just sitting there as though to remind me of my own mortality.’

I told him that someone was coming to pick it up, and this morning they eventually did. Ralph’s father arrived and drove his dead son’s car away from the aerodrome for the final time.

George got to see his girl this week though I’m not sure that it’s good for him. His head didn’t seem screwed on straight for the next two days if you ask me. That’s always been one of my problems with birds: they stop you from thinking right. I was glad that he had his head screwed on alright when he and the rest of the squadron ran into a big bunch of bandits on the 25^th, though. His plane had taken some cannon fire in the tail section and it must have been very hot up there. That night me, Billy and Alf put some hours in giving it a good going over and by about one in the morning we were happy that George would have the best Hurricane in the squadron again the following day.

When George went off to see his girl the following evening, I plucked up a bit of courage and asked Joyce if she fancied a drink with me that evening. To my surprise she said yes and she suggested we went to one of the quieter pubs. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but I was blown away when I realised that all she really wanted to talk about was engines! Would higher octane fuel improve the performance of the Merlin? What did I think about evaporative-cooled engines compared to liquid glycol-cooled ones? Could I explain how a centrifugal-type supercharger worked?

I was in my element to be honest, but I couldn’t help but be surprised that a lady was so fascinated by engines – it’s something I’ve never seen before. I said this to her and she replied a little tartly that ‘I told you already that my father’s a car mechanic.’

‘Well my mother was a washerwoman,’ I said, ‘and I’ve never had the slightest interest in washing.’

‘I guess you’ve got a point there,’ said Joyce, laughing, ‘it is a bit strange. But it’s true: I do like engines, always have done, and I’ve liked listening to you talking about them. You know so much.’

I went a bit red and then even redder when she gave me a peck on the cheek and said that she ought to be getting home. I walked her back and said goodnight.

‘Perhaps we could go to a dance some time,’ I said, wishing almost immediately that I hadn’t.

‘We can do, but I’m quite happy to sit and talk about engines if you’d prefer that,’ she said.

My heart sang when I heard those words.

But George’s friend Ralph is dead. George landed in triumph on the 20th having scored one definite and one probable victory against two German planes over the Channel near Dover but his mood soon changed when he learnt of Ralph’s death and he looked stunned for a minute. Then he asked me rather absent-mindedly about Ralph’s car and would I make sure it was looked after. And then he set off for the pub where he no doubt had a belly-full of ale. I looked over his plane and then walked back to my billet to work on my plans for the clockwork Hurricane. I like a quiet drink, but I don’t like to go and drown my sorrows or worse still to have a good time when a man has just died. I would rather divert my mind in some way – with a little problem to solve or a new piece of violin music to learn.

Of course, when the cockneys got back from the pub that night, they came in drunk and in loud falsetto whispers said, ‘Be careful not to wake old clockwork Frank’. But they soon quietened down after I’d ignored them.

What happened to the Defiants the other day made me think about what I wrote in my diary last week about being suspicious of the people giving the orders. The Defiants are planes without forward-facing guns that were sent up to fight, relying on the rear-facing gunners to protect them. Of course, the Germans had them worked out. Ten men got killed from the Biggin Hill Defiant squadron just a few days ago and it’s a disgrace, in my opinion – no better than sending the men over the trenches to their deaths in the First World War. I just hope it’s the last time that those planes get sent up.

I wasn’t quite sure what George meant when he asked me to look after his friend’s red Singer car so I paid a young lad from one of the local farms a couple of pence to give it a wash and I checked under the bonnet to make sure it looked alright. It felt strange to be tinkering around with a dead man’s car but I expect someone from his family will come and pick it up soon enough and perhaps they will appreciate the fact that we’ve looked after it.

There’s not much mourning, really. The other pilots don’t like to think or talk about it too much, because if they did I expect they’d think too hard that they might be next.

Thinking like this makes my head ache so I have been throwing myself into making my mechanical toys. I’ve wanted to do a wind-up Hurricane for a while and as I spend so much of my life with them it should be a fairly simple task, I think. I’m even going to be able to use real pieces of fabric from the Hurricane in order to construct it. I also wanted to have pea-shooter guns that fire automatically when it is wound up, so my audience will be treated to the twin-spectacle of a spinning prop and chattering guns, but this is a slightly more complicated part of the mechanism that I still need to work out.

Of course, I have very little time for all of this as the hours that I have to spend on George’s real plane are long. The Hurricane – marked with the letter ‘N’ – is being put through its paces flying three to four patrols a day and engaging enemy aircraft more and more regularly. George told me about his head-on attack on a formation of Dornier bombers the other day and his flight almost to France in pursuit of a Messerschmitt. I told him that he should have stopped off at Calais and bought me and the boys a couple of bottles of French wine.

One of the WAAFs who works with a Spitfire squadron came over and spoke to me yesterday. A very nice girl by the name of Joyce, in her mid-twenties and a very bonny brunette. She told me a story about one of the Spitfire pilots who’d been facing the enemy when he pulled his trigger and nothing happened. The guns had been incorrectly loaded by the armourer. He was so furious that when he got back he jumped out of his plane, pulled his pistol out of his flying boot and slammed it on the table in the mess where his armourer was sitting. ‘I’m very tempted to shoot you,’ he said to the poor chap who had turned completely white. But instead he got him put up on a charge and he had to be moved out of the squadron.

Joyce is delivering engine parts to the Spitfires, but she told me that she wants to work as a mechanic. ‘Trouble is,’ she said, ‘is that you men don’t think that we can work with engines, though I think we’ve proved we can do most other things that men can do. The fitters over in the Spitfire squadron feel threatened by me. My dad was a mechanic, you see, so I know my way around an engine.’

‘Well you’re very welcome to come and look over my shoulder any time,’ I suggested in a friendly way.

‘Very kind,’ she winked back at me, ‘but I only like Spitfires. There’s something about them that sets them apart from your Hurricanes, even though they share the same engine – it’s a bit like the difference between a racehorse and a carthorse.’ And with that, and a little smile, she left.

They did find the enemy on another day this week, though.  George engaged in combat over the Channel with some Messerschmitt 110s and he suspected that he may even have taken a bullet in his engine but I could not find any damage, or any bullet, when I looked. The feeling is that this is still the early stage of what will become a much bigger battle – the early skirmishes you might say. Soon I think the German aircraft will be coming over in big waves as they really try to knock the Hurricanes and Spitfires out of the sky. I personally feel that we’re being measured up, as though by an undertaker. They’re just finding the right coffin to fit right now.

Me and George have been getting on very well with one another. In the main we talk about the engine on his Hurricane, but what I like about him is that he’s always happy to listen to what I’ve got to say whereas most of them’ll just ignore you, thinking that you’re a brainless grease monkey. There’s a degree of separation between the ground crew and the pilots – a class divide you could say. The pilots who the ground crew get closest to are the Non-Commissioned Officers, or Sergeant Pilots, who come from similar backgrounds to us and had a lot of experience flying before the war. But such is the difference between the officers and us aircraftsmen that we usually drink in different pubs – they have the White Hart at Brastead and we have the The Old Jail Inn closer by. We all prefer it that way (and most of us ground crew don’t have cars to drive as far as Brastead, anyway).

I like to sup an ale or two with Alf and Billy in the evening but George always goes to the White Hart where I hear that he’s a quite a prodigious drinker. One night I heard that he got a bit rowdy and when the landlady asked him politely to pipe down he shouted at her that he’d only pipe down once someone had fetched his wife. Of course in the morning he was very embarrassed and went in to apologise, being the decent chap that he is. He had already done a dawn patrol and had driven up to the pub in his little Riley sports car at about 11 o’clock. Unfortunately, though, he’d made the mistake of telling everyone where he was going. After he’d made his apology to the landlady he ordered a hair of the dog and had one sip of it when the phone rang – the squadron was being scrambled and he had to get back to the airfield straight away. He put a beer mat on top of his pint and drove at top speed straight up to the dispersal hut where he sprang out of the car and ran to the plane.

‘Glad you could make it, Mr Sheridan,’ I shouted at him as he clambered up onto the wing and I jumped out of the cockpit. ‘Look after her, won’t you,’ I added, slapping him on the back and jumping down onto the ground.

After an uneventful sortie, George drove back to the pub to finish off his pint that the landlady had left on the bar for him to drink. Afterwards he returned to Biggin Hill in time to find me playing a mournful lament on my violin.

‘Sherlock Holmes played better violin than you, Frank’, he shouted over my playing with a broad grin.

‘That as may be,’ I replied, ‘but his detective skills were nowhere near as good. Look what I found in your engine.’

I pulled a bullet from my pocket that I’d found while doing my regular check. It had done no damage but must have been resting there since his dogfight over the Channel a few days ago. I don’t know how I missed it the first time around or how it got in there – I saw no entrance hole.

‘Well, let’s hope Jerry doesn’t get any closer than that,’ said George, smiling a little grimly.