A man with a wooden leg walked along a hospital corridor.

He was a short, vigorous type with an athletic build, thirty years old, dressed in a plain charcoal gray suit and black toe-capped shoes. He walked briskly, but you could tell he was lame by the slight irregularity in his step:

tap-tap, tap-tap. His face was fixed in a grim expression, as if he were suppressing some profound emotion.

He reached the end of the corridor and stopped at the nurse’s desk.

“Flight Lieutenant Hoare?” he said.

The nurse looked up from a register. She was a pretty girl with black hair, and she spoke with the soft accent of County Cork. “You’ll be a relation, I’m thinking,” she said with a friendly smile.

Her charm had no effect. “Brother,” said the visitor. “Which bed?”

“Last on the left.”

He turned on his heel and strode along the aisle to the end of the ward.

In a chair beside the bed, a figure in a brown dressing gown sat with his back to the room, looking out of the window, smoking.

The visitor hesitated. “Bart?”

The man in the chair stood up and turned around. There was a bandage on his head and his left arm was in a sling, but he was smiling. He was younger and taller than the visitor. “Hello, Digby.”

Digby put his arms around his brother and hugged him hard. “I thought you were dead,” he said.

Then he began to cry.

“I was flying a Whitley,” Bart said. The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley was a cumbersome long-tailed bomber that flew in an odd nose-down attitude. In the spring of 1941, Bomber Command had a hundred of them, out of a total strength of about seven hundred aircraft. “A Messerschmitt fired on us and we took several hits,” Bart continued. “But he must have been running out of fuel, because he peeled off without finishing us. I thought it was my lucky day. Then we started to lose altitude. The Messerschmitt must have damaged both engines. We chucked out everything that wasn’t bolted down, to reduce our weight, but it was no good, and I realized we’d have to ditch in the North Sea.”