Frank Edwards, my faithful engineer, also asked me to be his best man the other day; he is going to marry one of the WAAFs based here. Some of the other pilots have been ribbing me about it, as Frank is a mechanic, but I told them that Frank is a decent chap and that I am very proud to be his best man. Without his help I might not be alive today.

Biggin Hill is back on its feet again as we’ve now had almost ten days without being bombed. Supplies have been brought in, telephone communications have been re-established and the aerodrome itself has been patched up. The place is still a mess, it’s true, with rubble lying everywhere and barely a building still standing, but it is fully operational.

We’re standing at readiness right now. Frank is sat on the grass next to my Hurricane, waiting for the signal. I’m with the other pilots, some in deckchairs, others lying on blankets laid out on the grass, about 100 yards from the planes. The weather is fine and Canary, the Intelligence Officer, is going around sniffing the air and saying that today’s going to be a big show. ‘I can smell it, chaps,’ he says.

The momentum has been with the Luftwaffe since at least the end of August but Canary says that they’ve made a crucial strategic error by starting to bomb London rather than continuing to break down the 11 Group airfields.

‘They’ve let us get back onto our feet, chaps,’ he is saying as I write this, ‘and now we can land a punch right on the kisser.’

Of course that sounds wonderful but after seeing the massed ranks of the Luftwaffe above London on September 7, I wonder whether it is possible for the RAF to inflict a ruinous defeat on them. The sheer numbers were simply overwhelming. Yet if all the squadrons available to us, not just in 11 Group but in 12 Group too, could co-ordinate an attack on the ponderous armada of slow bombers, then I’m sure we would cut them very deeply indeed.

I feel that I have done the right thing by staying here to fight anyhow, rather than going to Wales. If my son or daughter is born and I’m no longer here, then at least Jane will be able to say that I died in defence of the country and that I stood up for what I believed in. She will say that I did my duty and faced my fears.

Hold on! The telephone is ringing now. Canary is picking it up.

Tally-ho! Here we go!

Once I had returned to the aerodrome and made my report, Canary, the Intelligence Officer at Biggin Hill, asked me whether I had seen the Heinkel hit the ground or the sea.

‘No I didn’t, sir’, I said, ‘I was too busy keeping an eye out for other bandits. But I’m certain that it could not have survived.’

‘All the same,’ he said, with that rather arch look that he seems to have spent some time mastering, ‘I’ll have to put it down as a probable unless someone else comes and corroborates your story and tells me that they saw it hit the ground.’

I shrugged, as I have learned to do with him. There’s no point arguing with the man. He’s a clever sod who read philosophy and mathematics at Cambridge. And not only that, he also played cricket for the first XI at university and a bit of football for Norwich City. I expect he plays a bloody good game of chess as well. Some of the chaps call him Canary because of his Norwich connection, others ‘the spy’ because he’s the Intelligence Officer.

Soon after, as I was speaking to Frank, the newspaperman Alexander Rhodes arrived and spoke to us for a while. Frank said some extraordinary thing to him that Canary overheard and described as ‘salt of the earth philosophy.’ It made me laugh.

But there isn’t much else to laugh about. Biggin Hill has almost been completely destroyed and yesterday afternoon, as we sat about in the warm sun, waiting to be scrambled to intercept another attack on the 11 Group airfields, there was a surprise. We were sent up not over the south-east coast to try and cut off another attack on our aerodrome, but up to London to intercept the largest force of the entire battle so far: 350 bombers with an escort of more than 600 fighters, spread across a front more than 20 miles wide. We were too late to do much about the bomb attack on the East End of London, but we caught them on their way back, heading down the Thames estuary. It was like an enormous black tidal wave heading out to sea. We burst into them and suddenly there were planes spiralling, jinking, skidding and smoking all over the place. I hit a Dornier with a burst and then an Me 109 before I ran out of bullets and sped for home.

The fires burned in London all night. We could see the smoke from Biggin Hill this morning. Hundreds of civilians have been killed. Many feel the invasion really is now imminent. Is it?

The results of the bombing, aside from the deaths, have been devastating.  The airmen’s barracks, the sergeants’ mess, two aircraft and a hangar were destroyed in the attack on the 30^th, but it was a direct hit on an air-raid shelter full of airmen which caused all but one of the casualties. Men worked through the night to recover the bodies. It was a grim scene indeed. In the other attacks, the operations room was destroyed and the runway so badly cratered that while I was up in the air with the other chaps, people were working down on the ground to fill in the holes fast enough so we could land again before we ran out of fuel! I’ve shot down another two enemy bombers - both Dorniers – but there are so many that I can’t help but feel like King Canute standing in the sea as the tide washes over me.

My squadron has been stood down because we’ve seen so much of the action that the 11 Group top brass think we need a rest. But I can’t contemplate leaving Biggin Hill. Not while we’re being attacked. It would feel like running away. So after arguing with my Squadron Leader and the Group Captain and insisting that I remain here, with Frank as my engineer, they finally gave in. But they told me to take a rest first: 48 hours of leave effective as of today. I’m planning to drive down to Dunkirk to see Jane a bit later on.

I’ve never been superstitious but in recent days I realise that my routine before the flight has become meticulous. I always wear my red scarf. I always carry a picture of Jane in my pocket which I take out and kiss as I run across the runway to my plane. And I always get a slap on the back from Frank as he climbs out of the cockpit. In fact, I’ve come to think of him as a lucky charm. Apart from the fact that he’s a damned good engineer, that’s one of the main reasons why I’ve asked for him to remain with me. And it helps that he’s a bloody decent chap too, if a little peculiar.

But I wonder whether all this superstition will add up to anything, or whether it’s actually a lot of nonsense. Perhaps I’ll never know.

I think a lot about poor Henry, down at East Grinstead. I wish I could find the time to visit him. But I should at least write him a letter.

I’ve been polite to the new pilots and told them a thing or two about what it’s like up there and how to stay alive. I’ve taken them to the pub and bought them drinks. We’ve shared the odd joke and had plenty of chats about cricket and suchlike. But it’s different to how it was with Ralph, Brian and Henry. I don’t want these people to become my best pals, like they were. I’m not prepared to invest the effort, to be honest, because I don’t know whether they’re going to be coming back or not. But I have started to lend my car to Frank occasionally, so that he can take his girl somewhere away from the airfield and get some privacy. The man’s been good to me, after all.

I got a short letter from Henry at East Grinstead. It was not his handwriting but that of his nurse. The letter explained that ‘my hands were so badly burned that writing for the time being is beyond me.’ But he said he was being well-looked after by a very pretty nurse called Mary Lawrence, which did cheer him up a little. This made me smile also, for I realised that she would have to have written this out for him, though the letter as a whole left me sad and a little fearful.

We got moved out of our billets after the bombing on August 18. It seemed fine to be living on the airfield when there was little threat of being bombed, but once we’d been bombed once, the top brass realised that every squadron of pilots living here could be wiped out in one lucky strike by the enemy – it was too much of a risk. The CO, though, said that ‘if the Germans had any decent information, they’d know not to bother bombing the aerodrome; they’d bomb the White Hart instead. We’d be decimated!’ When Mr Churchill said the other day that ‘never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few’, the CO said ‘Watch out, chaps, the PM has seen our mess bill!’

I pulled Frank away from a burning building after the bombing raid on the 18^th and he had to rest up for a few days afterwards. Fortunately, there was a lull in the number of German planes coming over between the 20^th and the 23^rd and Frank was back with me by the time things got hot once again yesterday. Our squadron was scrambled, along with eleven others from a few different airfields to break up a raid of 40 Dornier and Junkers bombers with an escort of more than 60 109s. We succeeded in turning them back but later on, overnight, central London was hit in a bombing raid. There was a big raid on Portsmouth too, I gather, and many civilians killed. It’s made a lot of the chaps here very cross indeed.

We’re now living in a large manor house that has been loaned to the RAF, just a few miles away from the airfield. It can be quite a rowdy place. After long sessions at the pub, quite often a few girls come back with some of the chaps (though not with me, of course) and someone will play the piano until a couple of hours before dawn. I retreat to my bed long before though, happy with having sunk a few pints and without the need to have an all-night session before dawn patrol starts in that strange and mysterious half-light, filled with birdsong, just before the sun rises.

But then there are days like yesterday when no German planes at all came over; we remained on readiness but for the first time in an age we weren’t scrambled. The weather was the most beautiful imaginable: hot, dry and sunny with the kind of sky I imagine there is in the Greek isles in summer. It was so warm that we craved shade on the treeless aerodrome and so I lay on the grass under one wing of my Hurricane and took a nap, free of any thought, or anything, other than the sweetness of sleep. The other pilots did the same and under the starboard wing of my plane, Frank sat fiddling with his toy Hurricane, which is about the length of my forearm and equipped with remarkable pea-shooter guns.

‘Who is that for?’ I asked Frank, ‘you don’t have any children, do you?’

Frank was quiet for a moment as he often is, as though it takes him a minute or two to think of an answer.

‘It’s not for anyone but me,’ he said eventually. ‘I just like to make little things like this. It’s not for playing with really; it’s the making of it that’s important.’

‘But then what’s the point, if no-one is then going to play with it?’

‘The point is that I succeeded. I set out to do something and I did it. Couldn’t be simpler than that.’

I thought about that a little bit as I mulled over the events of the past few days. I set out to shoot down German bombers and fighters and on the 11^th I succeeded when I hit a 109 after we‘d attacked an enormous bunch of Heinkel bombers.  We were scrambled to intercept them somewhere near the Isle of Sheppey, not far from the Thames estuary. When I saw them all, I was shocked at how many aircraft there were in the sky. I looked around at our squadron: twelve planes against the massed ranks of well over a hundred bombers plus fighter escort. The squadron leader called the attack over the radio and we bounced into what looked like an enormous swarm of bees. I got a burst in on a bomber and turned away again, thinking that I’d done some real damage. However, I looked in my mirror and with an almighty shock and a surge of adrenaline, saw that there was a 109 slightly behind me and to the right at about 4 o’clock, no more than a hundred yards away. I heard my squadron leader on the radio warning me: ‘bandit on your tail, red two’. I turned hard to port and held on to the turn and I was struck by real fear, the certainty that I was about to be killed. But I knew that he couldn’t get a shot off yet and if I could hold on to the turn I would out-turn him. The ‘g’ was immense as I pulled on the stick as hard as I could, the plane fighting me and almost stalling, but I could see that I was tighter in the turn than he was and he couldn’t catch up with me. Very soon the position was beginning to reverse and I was getting onto his tail. I started shouting at my plane. ‘Come on, keep turning, keep turning,’ I was yelling at it in a fury. Then the 109 lost its nerve, jinked and started to dive. I rolled quickly out of my turn and followed it down, giving it a long burst from within 150 yards. ‘Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,’ I yelled triumphantly as I hit it and the plane exploded in mid-air. Sweat poured down my face.

The following day I was not so lucky when, in the afternoon, I went up against a huge formation of Dorniers near Folkestone and, following an ailing plane downwards, caught some machine gun and cannon fire from a 109 which was also following me. I managed to limp back to Hawkinge but with the undercarriage failing, the engine shot through and barely touching 90mph, and far too low to bale out, I decided to bump it down on the ground. I got it as slow as I could without stalling and put it on the deck where it bumped, skidded, turned and flipped up onto its side. But I made it out of the cockpit with just a few bruises.

Not long after, Hawkinge was bombed by some Junkers 88s and I had to sprint into a shelter as the ground trembled. As I crouched in the shelter the image that ran through my mind again and again was of Henry’s Hurricane in flames just an hour or so before. I saw him bale out but it wasn’t until later that day I knew he’d made it, albeit badly burnt.

Beyond the jokes though, the order clearly set out the expectation that there would be a major increase in the number of German aircraft being used to attack Britain the next few days. They were telling us that it was going to get worse rather than better, that more of us will die, get injured and burnt. Not that we talk about that type of thing in the mess or the White Hart pub. No, that’s the kind of thing that we save for private moments, like writing in our diaries, or sleepless nights at 2am. ‘Just don’t tell the others’ is the secret instruction, though I know that others are thinking about it too. At least Ralph’s car has gone, driven away, apparently by his father while we were up in the sky.

The day after the order was sent, it rained and just a few planes crossed the Channel, while yesterday on the 10th, the weather was so bad – thunderstorms, rain and wind – that no-one went up at all and the Germans stayed at home. The timing was fortunate as I knew that Jane had a day’s leave so after checking with the CO I drove out to see her in an early afternoon storm, through torrential rain, and sharp cracks of thunder which seemed to shake the ground as I was driving over it. The sky was the colour of a prize fighter’s black eye and the leaves were being whipped off the trees. I drove to Jane’s cottage near Dunkirk and ran through the rain to her front door. I was soaked through from the sprint to the house and as she opened the door she laughed and pulled me inside.

‘Hello darling,’ she said. ‘You’d better take those wet things off and let them dry out.’

‘Where’s your friend?’ I asked.

‘Oh, don’t worry about Violet, she’s at work at the radar station at the moment, and no doubt when she’s finished she’ll be visiting one of her friendly soldiers.’

So I stripped off and we spent the afternoon together in the little cottage being shaken by thunder before I drove back to Biggin Hill in the evening as the weather cleared; driving west into the sun, into the spreading clear sky, feeling tired, joyous and doomed.

Today it’s much warmer and brighter and we’re expecting large forces of German bandits. I’m sitting outside the dispersal hut in readiness writing this now and I’ve told Frank to give this diary to Jane in case anything happens to me.

I got hit by a German plane on the last day of July. I had not even seen it until it had put a cannon shell in my engine and the Merlin died on me immediately. That’s what often happens, but I’ve also seen planes explode in mid-air when a cannon shell or bullet hits the fuel tanks or the oxygen bottle: ‘Boom!’ the whole thing disintegrates in less than half a second and you know that the pilot had no chance. At least it was over quickly and the pilots didn’t get burnt to death.

In the glorious mid-afternoon of July 31 I was ‘the weaver’, as they call it, flying 1000 feet above and a little behind the rest of the squadron so that I could give warning if I spotted any bandits. We were heading towards Dover again, where a new phalanx of barrage balloons had just gone up. High up over Kent I spied in the distance above the sea the type of haze you sometimes get over the Channel on a fine day, and more than 20 balloons at about 5000 feet. We were on our way to intercept a large force of German bombers with fighter escort that had been plotted back at the 11 Group Ops room when a hefty clunk hit the front of my plane and the prop ground to a halt. A 109 with a yellow nose came whizzing past me and I yelled out on the radio to warn the others as I put my plane into a sharp downwards glide. Everything had gone strangely quiet. I maintained my course heading out to sea and decided to bale out rather than take the risk of putting the kite down with no engine, either on land or in the soup.

I detached myself from the oxygen and the radio, unbuckled my straps, slid the cockpit cover back and jumped out into the cold air about 6000 feet up. It seemed to take an age to come down but I eventually landed in a meadow full of frightened cows and an old farmer pointing a shotgun at my head.

‘Speak any English do ye?’ he asked.

‘Sod off, you stupid bugger!’ I shouted. ‘I’m as English as fish and chips. Now stop pointing that bloody gun at me.’

Once he’d realised his mistake he walked me down to the village pub and bought me a pint. And once the other villagers had heard what happened, a crowd of people poured into the pub and there were offers to buy me drinks from old ladies and housewives, as well as the men of the village.

I could have stayed until night-time and got as tight as a lord but I thought I’d better get back to Biggin Hill as soon as I could. Fortunately, a journalist from London was driving through and said he could give me a lift. His name is Alexander Rhodes, a Yorkshireman, who writes for Jane’s favourite paper, the Chronicle. And when in the car I mentioned that my name was Sheridan he, after a thoughtful puff on his pipe, asked whether I was related in any way to Jane.  Apparently she had written a letter to him about women’s work in the war and at the same time mentioned that her husband, George, flew Hurricanes. It made me smile.

Mr Rhodes drove me back to Biggin Hill in the warm dusk and parked next to Ralph’s red Singer which is still here. I found out the following morning that Brian never made it back. Now there’s just me and Henry left from the red scarf pirates.

I feel that I should not even write down in my diary all that happened that night. Needless to say, it was fantastic. We had some food in the pub and went upstairs and when I left in the morning to drive back to Biggin Hill, a little after dawn, I felt that I had not slept at all. But it was the most elated and magnificent tiredness I had ever known: like floating on clouds though without the mighty roar of my Hurricane’s engine.

Jane is worried that by the time we are able to live together again we will be such different people that we shall barely known one another. And she could not help but be scared of what might happen to me as well. She cried. I told her that I am already an experienced pilot and it is the green ones fresh out of training school that are most at risk. What I did not tell her is that many of the more experienced pilots are also being shot down. But I feel that it is a matter of mental attitude, as well as ignoring a lot of the official advice about how to fly – I’ve learnt that the three-plane ‘vic’ formation, for example, is a complete nonsense, and that the best way to avoid being hit is to never fly in a straight line for more than about twenty seconds in the combat zone. Me and the other pilots talk incessantly about tactics. I’ve learnt that you should always turn and face the attack rather than running away and that it’s best to act quickly and decisively rather than do nothing, even if it’s the wrong decision. I’ve also noticed that the chaps who are quiet and look most gloomy when we’re waiting to be scrambled are often the ones who get shot down most quickly, whereas those chaps who are laughing and joking with one another mainly seem to come back. So keeping the spirits up is all part of it, there’s no doubt.

On the afternoon of the 25^th the whole squadron returned safely after a furious fight with about 40 Me109s over a convoy near Dover again, a battle in which we were joined by another Hurricane squadron. At one point during the dogfight, coming out of a sharp turn, I saw I was heading straight for an Me109 which was so close that I didn’t have time to get a shot away. I decided that this was it and held my course, heading straight for the rear section of his fuselage. But he somehow managed to avoid me. I’m certain I hit two other planes – with bullets – but neither went down and I eventually ran out of fuel and had to return. When I got out of the cockpit I realised I was drenched in sweat.

I flew two sorties the day after I had seen Jane and I felt lucky that we didn’t run into any enemy aircraft, to be honest. Some chaps in the squadron go to the pub night after night or go up to the West End and stay up all night partying and fly the dawn sortie the next morning with an hour or two of sleep and plenty of drink left in their system too, I expect. Many of the best pilots do this. But I feel that my reactions are a fraction of a second slower after a night without sleep. I don’t quite have the same sharpness. Much as I wish I could see Jane like that every week, I don’t think that I can take the risk. After all, the responsibility that I have to stay alive is a responsibility not just for me, but for her as well.

Two days ago another squadron flying out of Biggin Hill got massacred in the sky. It was 141 Squadron, who fly Boulton Paul Defiants. I have always been glad that I don’t fly one of those planes and after what happened on the 19^th I’m doubly glad now. They’re very similar to the Hurricane but they weigh much more because they have a gun turret right behind the cockpit where a gunner sits. Because they’re so heavy they’re also a lot slower than my Hurricane – by more than 50mph! But the thing that I’d dislike the most about them if I had to fly one is that the poor pilot doesn’t have any guns of his own – the only guns are the ones coming out of the turret, facing backwards and up. That’s all very well if you’re expecting to be attacked from above and behind, but what will happen if you get attacked from the front and below? That’s exactly what happened on the 19^th when they were attacked near Folkestone by a gang of 109s who shot six of them down and killed ten men. It was a disaster and a black cloud hung over the airfield that evening. I went to the White Hart in Brastead for a few pints with Ralph, Henry and Brian, and they pulled my leg about my nickname in the squadron: ‘newly married’. The landlady also pulled my leg about an incident a few weeks ago when I’d had rather too many. We ended up laughing a lot. But it was the last drink I had with Ralph.

The following day we were scrambled to protect a shipping convoy called ‘Bosom’ from enemy bombardment in the late afternoon. We were given specific instructions to target the bombers and not the fighters, which we would leave to one of the Biggin Hill Spitfire squadrons and another Hurricane squadron to deal with. We were near Dover when we saw probably about 60 or 70 Junkers 87 dive-bombers, or Stukas, below us, with a 50-strong fighter escort above them, stacked up as though they were a flying Eiffel Tower – the sky was filled with metal. We had the advantage of height and the sun behind us and we bounced them straight out of that burning orb, diving through the fighter escort and taking them completely by surprise. I got a Stuka with a direct hit with a short burst from about 150 yards, and then chased an Me109 across the sea just as I had done a few days previously. This time, though, I caught it within a few miles and shot it down into the sea. I felt jubilant and headed back across towards the Kent coast. When I arrived back at Biggin Hill, though, I learned that poor Ralph had been killed. I felt strangely numb about his death, and the first thing that ran through my mind was that there are now only three members of the red scarf pirates. It made the whole thing seem rather pathetic. I spoke to Frank about Ralph and told him that we needed to look after Ralph’s Singer car that was parked near our billets on the aerodrome. Frank put an arm round my shoulders and said that he’d look after it until someone came to collect it.

The remaining three of ‘the pirates’ – Brian, Henry and me – went down to the pub together and had what we’ve started to call ‘our quota’ – eight pints of ale – before turning in for the night. As I lay there before I went to sleep, I did not think of Ralph or the air battle that day, I just had Ralph’s silly little red car driving through my drunken mind.

It started in earnest on July 10, which, although it already seems a long time ago, I remember as a day filled with cloud and showers, and packed with aerial incident. We’d already been up in the morning on a routine patrol when just after a typical lunch of ham, eggs and bread we were scrambled to provide cover for a shipping convoy. We’d been listening to Ralph playing the guitar in the dispersal hut when the call came in. I sprinted out of the hut with my Mae West lifejacket in hand as Frank started my Hurricane and I was soon in the air in a formation of eight other planes. Over the sea somewhere between Dover and Dungeness off the Kent coast we spotted what we thought were about 60 Dornier bombers, though we quickly realised that they were a mixture of Dorniers, Me110s and Me109s – and actually about 80 of them rather than 60 – mounting a concerted attack on the convoy. I felt a sudden surge of adrenaline as our section leader called out that he’d spotted the bandits. We called up for help and it soon arrived in the form of another Hurricane squadron from Croydon. We began a head-on attack of the bombers and I saw one Hurricane from the Croydon squadron collide with a Dornier and the two of them plunge in the sea together. I saw bombs dropping around the ships below and great plumes of water erupting from the sea, like fountains spurting up at us. We were soon supported by other squadrons. The Hurricanes concentrated on the bombers and the Spitfires went for the fighter escort. Very soon it was impossible to tell what was happening in the sky, as screaming aircraft, vapour trails, gun tracer and smoke obscured the action. I had attacked one of the Dornier bombers head-on, firing from about 200 yards with my Browning machine-guns, then turning hard left, jinking and ‘skidding’ and heading out to sea, looking over my shoulder and in my mirror as much as I could to check there wasn’t a fighter on my tail. When I looked ahead of me I could see a Messerschmitt 109 below me and further out to sea, apparently racing for home, so I set off after it as fast as I could. He dived down to within a hundred feet of the sea and sprinted across the waves with me following flat-out at about 350mph. I did not think about the man flying the machine, only that I had to catch the black-crossed plane and destroy it. I got to within a couple of hundred yards and fired three short bursts that I’m certain hit their mark but didn’t seem to do anything and before I knew it I could see the French coast ahead and realised that I had to turn around or risk attack from their anti-aircraft guns. I climbed up into the sky and made for home.

My squadron has not seen as much action as that in the few days since, which we have spent on regular sorties, but there have been reports of enormous enemy activity from all coastal regions and we are now in a constant state of extremely high readiness. It feels as though the battle has truly begun and we wonder when Jerry is planning to launch his rafts across the sea.