Chapter Seven
In all his four and a half years’ service James had never been posted to a station where there were no aircraft. He had lived so long amid the sound of aero engines that he had become unaware of them. But it was the quietness at Uxbridge which seemed the strangest feature of his new surroundings.
At times the place was more than quiet, it was silent. Silence was a state which had many qualities and some of them made him uncomfortable. The headmaster of his preparatory school had been a man of often ungovernable temper. It was not until he was seventeen that James realised in retrospect that he was a homosexual sadist whose deeply religious belief so unbearably repressed him that it caused those outbreaks of rage. They used to make him go red in the face and shout, showering spittle. It was always some boy’s misdemeanour which provoked him, and he would then wield his cane with great savagery on all transgressors. When he was in that mood a hush used to settle over the school and there was nothing quite like those silences for making James scared and unhappy.
At Uxbridge he was neither scared nor unhappy, but he felt disoriented; and, grasping at whatever points of reference from his old familiar life were available, he began to dwell on his concern for Nicole. He had heard from Henri, who had obtained his wish and was in command of an M.T.B.: one of several with french crews which formed half of a flotilla based at a Channel port. Henri had tried in vain to extract from Air Ministry or any Free French source of confirmation that his sister was on a secret mission in France.
James persuaded himself sometimes that Nicole had lied to him when she said she would be back after three months; if that were so, there was less reason to worry than if she had been truthful. But no sooner had he derived some comfort from the thought that she was not really overdue, than he accused himself of wishful thinking. If she had deceived him, he did not resent it for it was from love for him that she would have done so.
There was more than mental vexation. He had never been celibate so long since he left school and deprivation was becoming increasingly difficult to bear.
It was hard enough to have to sit in an office all day, when his life had centred for so long on flying, without living like a monk as well. There was an austere monastic air about the camp, one of the R.A.F.’s biggest, which comprised the main depot and a hospital as well as 11 Group Headquarters. The parade ground was the largest James had ever seen. The grey barrack blocks were old-fashioned and looked as though T.E. Lawrence, under his pseudonym of Aircraftman Shaw, might at any moment appear from one wearing breeches, puttees, a high-necked tunic and cheese-cutter cap. Even the N.A.A.F.I. belonged to an earlier era with its separate wet and dry canteens where the troops could buy cither food or beer, and the implication of separating the drunk from the sober.
The monastic illusion was dispelled by the ubiquitous W.A.A.F. officers and other ranks and the nurses; of whom James was taking increasing notice in the mess, the offices and Operations Room and about the camp roads.
By his second week he could not tolerate another day without the sight or sound of aeroplanes and without himself flying. His understanding wing commander agreed that he ought to familiarise himself with their ‘parish’. Early the next morning he took off in a Spitfire from Northolt to pay the first of a series of visits to the sector stations and their satellites. He took overnight kit stowed in the cramped fuselage space behind the cockpit, but did not intend to squander his opportunity to escape from office work in one spree. He would spend a day and a night at one station, go on to another the following day and return to Northolt and Uxbridge that evening. Then repeat the process at two other places a few days later. In addition to Northolt, Middlesex, there were North Weald, Debden, Hornchurch and Rochford in Essex; Martlesham in Suffolk; Biggin Hill, Kenley, Manston, West Mailing, Hawkinge and Gravesend in Kent, as well as his old squadron’s peacetime base at Stanswick: Tangmere, and Dallingfield, which he had recently left, in Sussex. By the time he had completed the first circuit he should be able to find good reasons for starting again at the beginning.
On the evening of his return to his own unit, Sunday 7th December, he heard a B.B.C. news reader announce that Japanese bombers had attacked Pearl Harbour that morning. The United States had been drawn into the war on the Allies’ side.
It was a short journey by Underground or road to the West End. James had been careful with his petrol coupons and drove himself and Tiny Ross, again his close companion, into London on the Monday evening. Since his last visit there to see Nicole he had been to the West End only twice, each time with Ross: to go to the cinema and look in at one or two favourite pubs. He had missed Nicole and felt lonely despite having a companion and being in crowded places. This time, after a couple of days among fighter squadrons at Martlesham and Hornchurch, he was in better spirits. With the spread of the war to the Pacific and the Far East - Hong Kong and the Philippines had been attacked that morning - the end of the war had receded even further than the Allies’ lack of success in North Africa and Russia had already put it. In such a scale of events, his private worry about Nicole seemed insignificant.
He and Ross dined at the Savoy and went on to a drinking club in Mayfair much patronised by the R.A.F.; where they found some old friends accompanied by three or four girls. Later, two or three more girls, who were playing in a musical comedy, turned up after the show. One was a tall redhead with wide-set green eyes, a hearty laugh and an American accent, who scanned the men with a spry, intelligent look and seated herself next to James. A harbinger of the New World and the new ally: representing, James thought, summing her up, progress and magnitude, liberality and generosity; tempered perhaps by impudent irreverence for the male sex in general and whatever company she happened to be in in particular. Let us see how much joint liberality and generosity we can put together and dispense to one another.
‘Gail wouldn’t be short for Abigail, would it?’
‘No, it would not.’ It amused her, or else the hearty laugh was part of her repertoire of stage business. ‘Have you seen the show?’
‘Not yet. I haven’t been up to London much in the last few months. How long have you been in England?’
‘A year and a half.’
‘It won’t be easy for you to get home now, I suppose?’
‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’
‘Where is your home?’
‘California. Where else?’
‘Should I have been able to tell that without asking?’
‘I guess you would if you were an American.’
‘What is there that makes Californians so recognisable? Apart, obviously, from their ravishing beauty.’
She threw back her head. Her long hair touched her shoulders, her slightly negroid lips parted to display flawless dentistry and her laughter was as full of energy as Niagara Falls.
‘You sure have a cute line, James. Stick with it.’
He saw her glance at one of the girls with whom she had come in, who was sitting beside Ross. A look of complicity sparked between them and James recognised that a message of agreement had been exchanged. He recognised the meaning of the signal he had intercepted and it stirred an excitement in him which had lain dormant for many months. He went on chatting to her while he savoured the anticipation of how the evening would progress and conclude, admiring her clear skin, her firm shoulders and bust, her long Californian legs and dancer’s waist.
The party moved on to a night club and James danced for the first time in his life with a partner who at once laid her cheek against his; just as he had seen it done so often in Hollywood films. The muscles of her waist and back were supple and strong, her breath had a hygienic, antiseptic, astringent odour.
James knew that he could not erase his memories of Nicole and he did not try to do so. He would have to meet some problems connected with that face to face, and soon, but this was not the moment for fretting about it. He had a fleeting fancy that thinking of Nicole was like opening a drawer full of treasured objects he had h
oarded, and he hoped it would not turn out to be that they were mementoes and nothing that he could use again.
When, after they had danced several times, they returned to their banquette, Gail caught her girl friend’s eye and then consulted the platinum and diamond watch on her wrist.
‘What time do you have to be on duty, James?’
‘Eight-o’clock.’
‘Joanna and I share an apartment. It’s not far: Half Moon Street. It’s a quarter of one: we have a rehearsal call at ten.’
‘Shall we go?’
Ross and Joanna took a taxi and James followed with Gail in his small M.G.
The girls set their alarm clocks for half past six, which allowed time for the two young squadron leaders to return to Uxbridge in time to shower and shave before breakfast.
Three nights later they went to see the musical comedy and met the girls back-stage afterwards.
*
Christopher qualified for the issue of petrol coupons for the journey to his new station on the grounds of economy. It would save two first-class fares if he drove Malahide and himself there. He had enjoyed his two months at O.T.U. because he was so pleased with the Beaufighter, but the last fortnight of exercises had bored him and he was keen to rejoin a squadron. His only reservation was that mid-December was a poor time at which to have to move all the way to Cornwall. If the course had lasted a fortnight longer he could have taken Christmas leave at home.
Trevanney was far down in the south-west of the county and he felt as though he were turning his back on the war instead of going towards it. He thought of air operations in terms of shipping strikes along the Belgian, Dutch and German seaboard; bombing raids across France and the North Sea on targets deep in enemy territory; fighter Sweeps over the Channel. Although he knew that the convoys which crossed the Atlantic from Canada, the United States and Latin America, and those which came north to the Western Approaches via the Cape Of Good Hope fought their way to their destinations in engagement with U-boats, long-range bombers and sometimes battle cruisers or battleships, he associated Cornwall with childhood holidays, cruises in ‘Jester’, his father’s twenty-five-foot Bermuda-rigged sloop, along the coast in the Easter holidays or on the way back from a visit to Normandy and Brittany in the summer.
There was nothing holiday-like about R.A.F. Trevanney when he saw it for the first time in the fading light of a winter sunset from the crest of a crescent of low hills to the west and north of it. The airfield lay three miles inland. Its two runways made a St. Andrew’s cross of pale grey concrete against the grass of what had once been farmland. Its two-storey red brick pre-war buildings and three hangars, its more recent single-storey wooden or cemented huts were all camouflaged to blend with the red and brown earth and the fields and woods of the countryside. Two squadrons of Whitleys were based here as well as the squadron of Beaufighters. The Whitleys flew eight-and-a-half-hour patrols over the sea, hunting U-boats. Several, in overall white paint to make them difficult to see against sea or sky, were marshalled on the black tarmac outside the hangars and along one side of the aerodrome. The Beaufighters, painted pale blue on their undersides and in broken khaki and green on their upper surfaces, were mostly in blast pens off the taxy track. Sand-bagged emplacements for Bofors cannons, old twin Lewis guns of Great War pattern and twin or quadruple Vickers machine-guns were sited around the perimeter for defence against air attack. Static water tanks, a fire-fighting precaution, reflected the sun’s sharply-angled rays; an ambulance and fire tender waited beside the control tower; a Whitley stood at one end of a runway preparatory to taking off; two others and a Beaufighter orbited in the circuit, waiting to land.
‘Here we are.’
Christopher’s enthusiasm struck no evident chord in his navigator. (Observers had been thus renamed at the end of November and those who qualified in future would wear a winged ‘N’ in a laurel wreath instead of the Great War-style simple ‘O’ with a wing sprouting from it. Those entitled to the latter were to grow increasingly jealous of their right to continue wearing it.)
‘Long way from the nearest pub.’
‘Cornish girls are pretty.’
Malahide let this pass. Christopher had seen him look at girls with dour, assessing intensity; but he had shown no inclination for their company. Christopher wondered if behind that bleak and saturnine regard there lay a romantic attachment to some voluptuous bronzed Amazon back in Queensland. It seemed unlikely. Perhaps Malahide’s cynically calculating stare was the product of a disillusioning and unrequited passion. Of several, maybe? That seemed equally improbable. In his cups, Malahide had been heard now and then to murmur ‘beaut sheila’ or ‘slashin’ line’ in presumed approval of some female glimpsed in a pub: but on each occasion he had fallen asleep immediately afterwards and had to be half-carried to the car.
They reported to the station adjutant, who told them the group captain had gone to H.Q. 19 Group at Plymouth for a conference and would see them the next day.
‘If you nip smartly to Number Two hangar you’ll be able to see Wing Commander Selleck before he goes to the mess for tea. I’ll call your squadron adj and tell him you’re on your way.’
Christopher’s only apprehension about joining his new squadron was how his C.O. would view his court martial, severe reprimand, six months’ loss of seniority; and the cause of it all, his low flying escapade. He knew his personal documents had preceded him. On the face of it he was branded as rash, at best, and irresponsible at worst: not calculated to make a good initial impression.
The squadron commander told his adjutant to send the new arrivals in one at a time. He came round the desk to shake hands and there was nothing in his manner to suggest that he had even read Christopher’s personal history or had it recounted to him by the adjutant. On the lapels of his tunic he wore the small brass ‘A’ of the Auxiliary Air Force and Christopher wondered by what route he had reached his present command. He also wore a D.F.C. The chances were that he had started in an ordinary fighter squadron. He was fair-haired, healthy-looking and in his late twenties: he wore the top button of his tunic unfastened in Fighter Command style and reminded Christopher of his own brother in a certain way. James had the same natural geniality through which, in the past eighteen months, an underlying hardness had become increasingly perceptible. Selleck had the same shrewd look as James, although with both of them it was masked by a relaxed style. Perhaps this had something to do with being on a fighter squadron, in which casualties were more noticeable and probably struck deeper than on squadrons where there were three or four men, or more, on every crew. A squadron commander had to be even more sure of the quality of his pilots and to develop a defence against feeling their loss too badly.
‘You’ll find at least one old friend on the squadron. I’m putting you on his flight.’
‘Who’s that, sir?’
‘Squadron Leader Gorman. I believe he instructed you at O.T.U. before you did your first tour, on Beauforts.’
‘That is good news.’
‘I see you’ve got an Australian observer… I should say navigator.’
‘He’s pretty good, sir.’
‘I’m afraid he’s going to be a bit lonely: we haven’t any other Aussies. There’s a New Zealander and there are four Canadians.’
‘My navigator will drink with anybody, sir.’
They talked for a few minutes about Christopher’s experiences on Beauforts. Selleck gave no hint that he had any reservations about him or that he knew Christopher had anything adverse on his record. When Christopher left his office he would unhesitatingly have knocked down anyone who said a word against his new squadron commander.
‘You’d better send Malahide in. Arthur Gorman will brief you on the operational situation after tea. There’s one thing you can count on: you’ll get in plenty of flying hours. We don’t depend on the weather or have to wait for reports of suitable targets, as they do on strike squadrons. We plug away at our patrols day in and day out. You won’t go s
hort of action, either.’
Christopher had no ready response to this. He nodded and hoped that he was looking keen and intrepid.
‘By the way, you needn’t think you’re under any obligation to compete with your brother. Our work is very different from normal day fighter squadrons’.’
So much for having an elder brother whose photograph appeared several times in newspapers and magazines and whose name figured on the frequently published Press lists of the highest-scoring fighter pilots.
‘I realise that, sir. He’s on rest at the moment, at Eleven Group. Doesn’t seem to be too keen on it.’
‘Who is!’
In the mess a quarter of an hour later Christopher found Arthur Gorman unchanged from the quiet-spoken, unruly-haired instructor whom he had known and liked in the summer of 1940, except for an additional ring on his cuffs. From him he learned why their squadron commander had sounded so mordant when he had mentioned that James was being compelled to fly a desk.
‘Roy Selleck was a flight commander on an Auxiliary Hurricane squadron when the balloon went up. His C.O. went for a burton over Dunkirk and Roy got the squadron. He bagged seven Jerries before he was shot down in July last year. It was a flamer and his arms were badly burned before he baled out: he was flying in shirtsleeves. He was in hospital for a long time. He came here as a flight commander and both the C.O. and the senior flight commander went missing soon after, so he took over.’
‘Nothing like being in the right place at the right time.’
‘He’s a good type.’
‘I can see that.’ Christopher speculated for a moment. He disliked subterfuge, concealment and uncertainty. He was momentarily alone with Gorman. Malahide had gone to help himself to some more tinned salmon sandwiches. He made up his mind to tackle his doubts head-on; as usual. ‘Did you know I’d put up a black?’
Too Late the Morrow Page 11
