Too Late the Morrow

by Richard Townshend, Bickers

  The next day they flew their first exercise together. When they joined a squadron their daily task would be to fly far out to sea to protect the low-flying submarine-hunting Wellingtons, Bostons and Sunderlands from enemy air attack: or to patrol off the Atlantic coast of France to intercept German long-range fighters and the huge Focke-Wulf Condors based there. Accurate navigation was therefore the essence of their work. As a preliminary they were sent on a long navigation exercise above cloud, around the British Isles. At each check point on the route they were very close to position and schedule.

  They landed. Christopher said ‘Good show, Harry.’

  ‘All you’ve got to do is go where I tell you, when I tell you. Too bad I can’t fire the bloody guns for you.’

  On the following day they did an air firing exercise, shooting at a target, a drogue shaped like a wind sock, towed by a Hawker Henley. Christopher had done some air gunnery in a Hurricane as a pupil pilot before he was selected for twin-engine training. Flying a Beaufort, the only gunnery exercises he had carried out were for the benefit of his air gunners. It was a year and a half since he had shot at a drogue and he had never before fired cannons. Target practice was in great demand at the O.T.U. and each Beaufighter could have only a few minutes of it. Christopher’s shooting that day was not among the best.

  When they returned from the range Malahide said casually ‘My old man’s a farmer. I grew up in the outback, before I moved to Brisbane. I can remember my three kid sisters knocking over rabbits with a two-two at a hundred yards when they were no more than twelve or thirteen. My brothers and I could hit’em when we were ten.’

  ‘1 suppose rabbit stew made a welcome change from a diet of mutton and kangaroo.’

  Christopher felt that he should have done better. The sarcastic retort was hardly upto Oxford University scholarship level, but he had been unprepared for Malahide’s taunt.

  He had a sense of disaster confronting him with no way of stopping it. Why on earth had he so precipitately invited Malahide to fly with him? He was feeling ashamed and miserable enough without the oblique insult. He reminded himself that he was not one for hedging precautions, for balancing the probable gains and losses in life - prestige, friendship - in order to keep the peace. It was pride which always tipped the balance for him. He was no dull opportunist, he created his own opportunities. In the past fifteen months he had known triumph and disaster, elation and grief; while Malahide had yet to hear a shot fired at him.

  ‘Feel like some low flying this afternoon, Harry?’' ‘Sure. Why not? Might as well spend the arvo that way, if we can’t get in any more firing practice.’

  Christopher went to see the Chief Flying Instructor, and, immediately after lunch, took off for the low-flying area. This was several square miles of rolling moorland where there were no inhabitants to disturb or alarm. He flew there at 5000 ft and made a steep dive at the ground as soon as he was within its limits. Pulling out at fifty feet he eased down to fifteen and flew straight at a hummock that rose to several times that height: scraped over it at the last moment, swooped down on the other side and tore headlong at a clump of trees. He barely missed their tops, then made towards a narrow valley along which flowed a minor river. He flattened out so low over the water that his propeller wash whipped it to foam, twisted along its sinuous course, popped over a bridge in the nick of time, hurdled a succession of hedges, then turned seaward in a steep climb to 10000 ft. Once he was well out over the North Sea he pulled up into a loop, looped a second time at once and rolled off the top, stall turned into a dive, levelled out and barrel rolled, barrel rolled the other way, did a four-point roll, flashed down to the sea, turned onto his back for a full minute, came right way up, climbed, spun for five complete revolutions, levelled off, side-slipped to starboard and then to port, performed a climbing roll or upward Charlie, and finally levelled off.

  On the way back to the coast he spotted a yellow object bobbing up and down on the waves. Going down, he saw it was an empty inflatable rubber dinghy. He climbed to 500 ft and turned towards it again, opening fire with his cannons at 400 yards. His first burst was a near miss. He went round again and with one second’s shooting sunk the dinghy.

  No word had been spoken since they had arrived in the low-flying area. When they landed, Malahide was still an interesting colour of gamboge yellow tinged with pea green; and it took him twenty minutes to clean his vomit out of his compartment.

  Over their first pint of beer that evening, Christopher remarked ‘Sorry to talk shop, but you’ll have to smarten up your drum-changing, Harry.’

  The Beaufighters at the O.T.U. were of the original type which did not yet have belt feed for the cannons. The observer had to reload them by heaving heavy sixty-round drums of cannon shells into place.

  Malahide looked sheepish. ‘You bastard. You did me over. Fair dinkum.’

  *

  Seen for the first time at dusk on a winter’s evening, the Halifax operational training unit was a gloomy wilderness of single-storey wooden buildings stained with creosote. A sharp wind whistled through the gaps in the sidescreens of the Morris Eight.

  Devonshire shivered. ‘Blimey! Bet I know who’s the station commander’ere: Group Captain bleedin’ Dracula.’

  They had driven through a dingy village a mile or so away, which had not been a promising prelude. The four pubs they saw had all looked sullen and cramped.

  Roger was allocated a room in a hut fifty yards behind the officers’ mess. Each hut had eight small rooms and they stood six abreast in three rows, with other huts which contained bathrooms and lavatories. Roger had never been so ill-accomodated. His room had a bed, two hard chairs, a rickety wardrobe, a chest of drawers and an enamelled washbasin on a metal tripod. There were two windows and in the middle of the opposite wall stood a coke stove. Beside it there was a discouragingly small scuttle, half-full, and he found that some newspaper and sticks had been put ready for lighting. It was very cold in the room. The floor was the usual red linoleum and a small mat lay beside the bed.

  Roger had a sharp nostalgia for Blytheswold. He went to the mess for tea and found no one he knew. Later, in the bar, he heard disquieting stories about the Halifax’s vices. He did not allow them to perturb him. To listen to any group of pilots of any type of aeroplane talking among themselves, one had the impression that it was prone to stall, spin, side-slip in a gentle turn, swing on take-off and develop a yawing of the tail as a matter of routine; that it was a miracle that anyone ever succeeded in landing it or taking it off without killing himself. To hear the same men discussing the same aircraft with pilots of some other type, would give the impression that it was a vice-free paragon.

  He was being interviewed by the Chief Flying Instructor the next morning when the roar of four 1280 h.p. Merlin engines running up for take-off interrupted them. They both looked out of the window to watch a Halifax accelerate down the runway. Long past the point at which Roger had expected it to unstick it was still rolling. He glanced at the C.F.I. and looked away hastily. The Halifax took to the air only a hundred yards before it reached the end of the runway, climbed steeply to 200 ft, dipped a wing, stalled in and hit the ground with a detonation, tall flames and a cloud of smoke.

  The C.F.I. picked up a telephone, asked for the control tower, asked ‘Who was it?’ replaced the telephone and resumed his conversation without comment.

  Half an hour later Roger met his new crew. His second pilot was a pallid, plump and obsequious pilot officer; nineteen years old and with a too-ready smile which showed a lot of gum. Shaking his hand was reminiscent of picking up a frog.

  ‘My name’s Eustace Unwin.’

  Flight Sergeant Devonshire, who didn’t give a damn for sprog P.Os, fixed him with a scornful look. ‘Eustace? Jeeze, we can’t call you Eustace. Are you always that pale?’ Pilot Officer Unwin blinked several limes and tittered. ‘Spook: that’s what we’ll call you. Spook.’

  Unwin, still smiling, shrugged and looked with resignation at Roger
, who merely nodded.

  The observer was about the same age, a Pilot Officer Bailey who said he was known, naturally, as Bill, although that was not his name. Roger had no desire to know what his parents had chosen for him: Bill would do. Bailey had a studious air, a quiet demeanour and was trying to grow a moustache, at which he was not doing very well.

  Devonshire was the wireless operator. The three air gunners were all sergeants: a twenty-two year-old Scot, MacTavish; and two boys of eighteen: Clooney, from New Zealand, and Tunks from Canada.

  Walking back to the mess for lunch, Roger felt a twinge in his leg and had to halt in his stride for a moment to recover. It hurt almost as much as it had when he was in hospital after a surgeon had done some extensive work on it.

  He took Unwin and Bailey into the bar and bought them each half a pint.

  ‘What were you doing before you joined, Bill?’

  ‘I was articled to a firm of accountants while I was waiting to be called up.’

  ‘And you, Spook?’

  ‘I was in the family business before I was called up.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Unwin flashed his bright pink gums that looked as though they had been touched up with some cosmetic. Roger noticed that his chalky complexion had a sheen in the artificial light: it was a day of lowering black cloud and the barman had switched on the two lights behind the bar. It was still gloomy. Unwin’s pale face shone as though it were glazed, but it was caused by sweat.

  ‘We’re a firm of undertakers, actually.’

  Roger nearly dropped his beer and the tankard slopped over as it slammed back the few inches he had lifted it, onto the counter.

  A stab of pain coursed the whole length of his wounded leg and when he led the way to the diningroom he found that his knee had become stiff.

  After lunch he went to his room to see how much coke had been put into his bucket. Approaching the hut, he saw a small, tubby W.A.A.F. whom he recognised as the batwoman who had brought him his tea that morning. She was carrying a coal scuttle in each hand and he hurried to overtake her, swinging his right leg stiffly.

  ‘Let me help you.’

  She turned ‘It’s all right, sir, I’m used to it.’

  ‘Is one of those for me?’

  ‘I’ve filled yours already, sir.’

  ‘Aren’t there any batmen to do this job?’

  ‘No, sir, there’s only four batmen and they’ve got their own work.’

  Roger was walking beside her, ashamed because he could not take the burden away from her. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘It’s Pugh, sir. But all the officers I look after always call me Taffy.’

  ‘Well, come and see me when you’ve dumped those, Taffy.’

  She was a plain little creature with a large mole on one cheek and mousey hair. He was touched and felt that she was like a poor little slavey in a Victorian novel.

  When she came in he gave her a ten-shilling note. ‘I always give my batman ten bob a month.’

  ‘There’s no need, sir.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ He pushed it into her hand. ‘I’d rather you had it now than at the end of the month.’

  She gave him an understanding look. ‘You needn’t worry about me carrying buckets, sir. I live on a farm. I have to carry heavier bucketsful than those, and uphill.’

  ‘I’ll try not to use a bucketful every day.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m strong.’

  Roger thought that he would rather have her in his crew than either his second pilot or observer. Cheerlessly he went to rejoin them for their introduction to the Halifax. It made him shudder even lo think about flying with an undertaker. In the R.A.F. an equipment assistant was known as a store-basher, an instrument repairer as an instrument-basher, and men of any other trade as appropriate-bashers. Unwin, he supposed, could be described as a corpse-basher. It was a nasty thought with which to begin a second tour of operations.

  His first close inspection of a Halifax did not give him much cheer. With a wingspan of just under 99 ft and a length of just over 70 ft, it looked big and tough enough to withstand a lot of battering. It also looked too big for flak or fighters to miss, even at very long range. Fully loaded it would weigh almost 27 tons and only a little over half a ton of that was contributed by its bomb load. With a maximum speed of 265 m.p.h. and a celing of under 23000 ft, coupled to the lack of manoeuvrability inherent in its bulk and design c haracteristics, it would have a poor chance of taking effective evasive action when under attack.

  If night fighters set about it, what armament did it carry with which to defend itself? That became his main concern as he clambered about inside the fuselage. There were two.303 machine-guns in a nose turret, four in a dorsel turret abaft the trailing edge of the mainplane and four more in a tail turret. At first sight, adequate all-round protection; but night fighters nearly always had the benefit of searchlights which held a bomber in their glare and blinded its gunners. A night fighter crew could shoot at a brilliantly illuminated bomber from a great distance while still out of view itself. They could kill or incapacitate the air gunners in their turrets in their first attacks, before moving in to finish off the pilot, shatter the engines, ignite the fuel, or blow up the bombs it carried.

  No such thoughts had assailed Roger twenty-six months previously when he Hew his first operation in a Blenheim.

  There was something else which Roger found less than welcome. In June, Halifaxes had been used on a daylight operation for the first time; against Kiel, one of the enemy’s most strongly defended targets. Soon after, they were sent to bomb the battle cruiser Scharnhorst at La Pallice, on the Bay of Biscay. These precedents were not encouraging to one who had hoped to turn his back on daylight raids once and for all on parting from Blenheims.

  Roger began to suspect that he was not the person he had always thought he was, and he began to wonder how much of his fears Creamy Devonshire would be able to read. They had been together so long that it was hard to dissemble his emotions. It worried him that, despite Devonshire’s declaration that he would happily spend a year as an instructor, he had shown no sign of reluctance to come back prematurely to a squadron. If he is impervious, why not I? was the question he put to himself.

  On his second evening at this dismal place he felt he ought to make an effort to infuse some team spirit into his crew, to display the qualities of leadership which had, in theory at least, earned him his commission. He suggested that they should meet at the main gate after dinner and go to whichever of the local pubs seemed the least evil. Funerals evidently provided an excellent livelihood - the noun had a certain incongruity - for Unwin owned a 1939 18 h.p. Wolseley. A black one. (‘As big as a bloody’earse,’ said Devonshire. ‘Looks like one, an’ all.’) He conveyed the three air gunners - Devonshire refused to set foot in the gloomy vehicle - and Roger took the rest.

  The two hours they spent in the saloon bar of, first, The Nag’s Head and then The First And Last, were not convivial. Unwin tried to buy drinks out of turn and flashed five-pound notes in the process. Bailey rarely said much or smiled. MacTavish became drunk within an hour and Devonshire confided to Roger that he had been drinking rum-and-peppermint with beer chasers in the sergeants’ mess for an hour before coming out. Clooney and Tunks were some compensation. They were shy at first but Roger’s kindly interest in them soon brought out their natural liveliness and humour. What should have been an occasion of crew solidarity became divisive. Roger, Devonshire and the two Commonwealth volunteers swapped yarns, joked and laughed. Unwin smiled unremittingly and laughed obsequiously whenever Roger offered the chance. MacTavish slumped in a corner, crooning unintelligibly to himself, dribbling slightly and from time to time swearing with hideous and horrifyingly original obscenity.

  Roger, earlier in the evening, had asked him what he used to do in civilian life.

  ‘I was at Glasgow University, and as soon as I’d well taken my degree, the Government sent me my calling-up papers. I volunteere
d for air gunner because I thought that with a degree I’d be given a commission. I must have been drunk at the time.’

  When they returned to camp Roger went straight to his room. Acw1 Pugh had, wordlessly, put an old but comfortable small armchair in it and he sat down with his tunic off, in slippers, to read for the umpteenth time. ‘Carry On, Jeeves’ in the expectation that it would cheer him. He found that reflection on his crew insisted on interposing between him and P.G. Wodehouse. He laid the book on his lap and thought over the uncongenial company in which he had spent the evening. That quickly brought back what he had been thinking about ops in a Halifax.

  Everyone’s ideas underwent changes while growing up, and although he had considered himself an adult at eighteen, no doubt his maturing process had resumed when the war began. His ideas of poverty and riches had changed in the past two years and two months. He felt comparatively well-off now, for instance, seated in an armchair before a stove, with an enjoyable book. He had felt the same during his tour on Blenheims whenever operations had been cancelled on account of bad weather and he had known that he would not die that day or that night. Only his knowledge of his family had remained constant: his parents, his cousins, his aunt and uncle had behaved exactly as he had known they would: the elders with love, support and courage; his coevals with cheery br avery and affection. His ideas of God and of eternal life had undergone changes too, and he was not yet able to determine them.

  He hoped he had acquired enough wisdom and resolution to be able to do something with his crew.

  In the morning he went up with an instructor for his first flight in a Halifax, while his crew began their training separately. Their lives were not to be risked in his hands yet.

  His leg, which had begun to stiffen when he walked towards the aircraft, became almost useless when he took over the controls. He had to operate the rudder bar with his left foot while his right remained as though paralysed. He had to exert considerable effort to fly at all and felt sweat pouring down his ribs while he gulped short-windedly as though at the end of a cross-country race, and felt his arms trembling with what he hoped was physical effort rather than fear.