The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .
Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.
It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.
71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”
A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.
Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.
But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:
“But what shall we do about us?”
“What about us?”
“Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.”
He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.
And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”
From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia’s cigarette lighter that it’s just a matter of time before flirting becomes romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another operational tour).
But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone switchboard operators.
Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross, then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she published nine Harlequin romance novels.
The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable tale that’s rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War Two.
The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)
This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.