Too Late the Morrow

by Richard Townshend, Bickers

  Of course, there could be a change of weather or plan that would cause the operation to be cancelled. He was finding it difficult to convince himself that he would not call the deal off, in that event.

  *

  They were putting on their flying gear in the crew room. Roger became aware that Pike was looking at him and he did not care for the expression he caught on Pike’s face.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Roger?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Thought you looked rather browned off.’

  He means thoughtful and might even mean windy.

  ‘I was just going over the briefing in my mind.’

  ‘Piece of cake.’ Pike’s breeziness jarred. It struck Roger as an absurd way in which to refer to the prowling Me 110s andju 88s, the myriad searchlights, the belts of 88 mm and 115 mm anti-aircraft artillery. ‘Your crew must have taken all the notes you’ll need.’

  ‘I was thinking about the targets.’ It must sound rather lame. ‘I don’t want to waste my bombs on the railway. I hope we can spot the steel works.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll prang them before you make your run: they’ll be burning… you won’t be able to miss them.’

  ‘What a line.’ The automatic response, his innards like jelly.

  Riding out to the marshalled aircraft in the air crew bus, Roger sat next to Unwin and could see his face dimly in the moonlight. It had its familiar sheen of sweat and he knew that Unwin was as scared as he was. Unwin exuded an aroma of lavender talcum powder, violet brilliantine and Acqua Velva aftershave lotion. No doubt he used these as an antidote to the smell of embalming fluid in the course of his professional duties; but they were hardly officer-like and Roger was in the mood to tell him so. He looked round. On the seat behind him, Bailey sat looking tense and tight-mouthed. Next to him, MacTavish, his eyes fixed straight ahead and a foolish smirk on his lips, exhaled the fumes of rum. He drank so much that his breath was seldom untainted and Roger hoped that he had not been seeking Dutch courage in the last few minutes.

  Wing Commander Weatherall was leading the raid. He rode democratically in the coach with his crew. It stopped first at his aircraft and as he passed he paused beside Roger.

  ‘Hope you enjoy the trip, Roger. You must be glad to be back after the boredom of two O.T.Us.’

  Roger could have tolerated a great deal of boredom at that moment.

  ‘I hope the weather doesn’t clamp, sir.’

  He devoutly wished it would, He had suddenly found himself able to pray quite fluently when he went up to his room just before going out to board the bus and had sat for a moment begging God to send storm clouds over the route to Cologne.

  Standing beside the Halifax he had the notion that it was shaped like a coffin and he wished that he could banish Unwin from his sight instead of having to spend the next few hours at his side.

  It was not until he moved towards the hatch after doing his external checks that he realised that his right leg was throbbing from groin to ankle and that the knee joint had stiffened. He was clumsy in climbing aboard and he sat with his leg thrust straight out in front of him while he went through the pre-take-off checks, wondering if he would be able to coax the heavy aeroplane into the air before it ran off the end of the runway and killed them all. He wished that Devonshire had not christened Unwin ‘Spook’: it was likely that all seven of them would shortly be ghosts.

  *

  Over Holland at 20000 ft. they saw the vertical beams of the searchlights which were beacons for the night fighters. They saw the shifting beams of the other searchlights which pointed towards themselves and the other Halifaxes ahead and astern at two-minute intervals, sweeping in their great arcs in a beckoning motion, ushering the Me 110s and Ju 88s to the area of sky where they could make an interception.

  The clouds above which they flew were in scattered clumps. Ahead the clouds lay more thickly but there were still huge spaces between the banks. There was no hope of a recall. They would not be turning back before they reached Cologne. Roger listened to the healthy roar of the engines and monitored the gauges, hoping for a faltering note, a rise in cylinder head temperature, a drop in oil pressure. None of these things happened. He scanned the sky for the silhouette of a fighter or for the flicker and stab of exhaust flames from a fighter’s exhaust ports. He saw none.

  ‘All right, Creamy?’

  ‘All O.K., Skip.’

  That was not the right answer: which would have been that the radio had become unserviceable.

  ‘Kiwi?’

  The front turret gunner sounded placid. ‘All O.K., Skipper.’

  ‘Canuck?’

  The mid-upper gunner in the dorsal turret was serene. ‘Enjoying the view, Skip.’

  ‘Mac?’

  MacTavish’s slurred and husky glottal-stopped reply was reassuring to the others but not to Roger. ‘Aye, Skipper, it’s a braw nicht and I’ll bucking get my bucking shot in first at any bucking festering Jerry that shows his nose within five hundred festering yards of us.’

  Roger would have preferred to be informed that someone’s turret had jammed and would not rotate.

  The Halifax shuddered in the blast of exploding flak from the heavy guns. The 88 mm shells detonated with their characteristic double thump. Orange, red and yellow flames lit the sky, seemingly within arm’s length. The Halifax lurched to starboard as a shell burst close beneath its port wing. Roger’s right leg was rigid, the foot jammed against the pedal. The aircraft dipped and swung to the right. Unwim jerked his head round, staring at him with his mouth open in alarm.

  Slowly Roger straightened out and began climbing to make up the height he had lost. A cluster of bright flashes ahead made him blink. A searchlight settled on them, dazzling him. He waited for the next volley of shells to burst, aimed right at them as the searchlight held them. The beam was suddenly cut off, reduced to a truncated patch spread across the underside of a big cloud directly beneath them. Roger breathed more easily.

  Not for long.

  ‘Fighter astern, four hundred yards, same height.’

  ‘Well done, Mac.’

  Through his baffling helmet and above the noise of the engines, Roger heard the four rear guns open fire. He saw a stream of tracer from the night fighter flick past his window. He dived to the right in a corkscrew turn. The slipstream of the fighter struck the Halifax. He looked up to his left and saw the silhouette of a Me 110. He completed a 360 degree turn and started to climb to his original height and on his original course.

  The searchlight had moved, probing through a gap in the clouds to his left and ahead. Flak burst in thick clumps around the beam. The sky blazed, flames lighting the shape of a burning Halifax. The glowing wreckage fell and disappeared in a cloud.

  The blaze had lit two more Halifaxes. Roger saw streams of tracer which ended against the fuselage of the nearer one. Fire flickered, grew and spread. The flaming aircraft slowly descended. In a searchlight beam he saw two parachutes.

  ‘Mid-upper… fighter three-o’clock, above, five hundred yards… coming in.’

  ‘Stand by for diving turn to port.’

  The dorsal guns fired briefly before Roger made a tight corkscrew down to the left. Yellow flashes against the port wing showed where the 110’s shells or bullets had struck. He held the twisting dive for two complete turns and came out below 18000 ft. Tracer from the rear turrets of two Halifaxes ahead was converging on an aircraft he could not see. Peering, he made out its exhaust flames. There was a bright flash which spread its radiance far around the sky and Roger saw a Me 110 blow up.

  ‘That’s the way to do it, gunners.’

  Back up to 20000 ft, to put the greatest possible distance between himself and the flak batteries.

  Ten… fifteen minutes of quiet. No flak closer than a mile, where some other squadron was under fire. No searchlights closer than two miles. No night fighters. ‘Target coming up, Skip. Five minutes.’

  ‘Thanks, Bill.’

  Searchlig
hts all over the place now. Flak all around them. Roger felt the tightening sensation in his scrotum that accompanied extreme fear.

  Flak splinters rattled against the fuselage. Incandescent patches on the ground marked the destruction caused by his predecessor’s bombs. The Halifax rose abruptly as two shells burst directly under it. The starboard wing went up and looking out on the other side Roger could see jagged metal on the port wing where shell fragments had punched holes.

  The Halifax tumbled to the left and the control column and rudder bar juddered. For a moment the controls felt mushy. The Halifax dropped abruptly and Roger felt as though his stomach had detached itself from his intenstines and hit the cockpit roof. Flames lit the cockpit, shining into his left eye. Fire rippled through a long crack in the cowling of the port outer engine. Roger feathered it.

  Now he could turn for home. First, order Bailey to jettison the bombs. It didn’t matter where they fell. But Bailey spoke first.

  ‘That should be the steel works, the big white patch at one-o’clock.’

  Damn Bailey, lying prone in the nose at the bomb sight. I want to get away… to go home.

  ‘Right, Skipper… a bit more… right… ‘

  Roger applied right rudder.

  The flak ahead was thick, coming up fast, laying a carpet of shell bursts right in their path.

  To the left, the flak was less intense. There lay the railway yards. Acres and acres of track, where locomotives and trucks stood in their thousands.

  A flurry of bursting shells a hundred yards in front of him made Roger blink.

  ‘I’m going for the railway yard. She’s a bitch to turn to starboard with this dead engine.’

  Marginally true. And his leg didn’t work properly in a right turn. Also an excuse, but one which he must keep to himself. The truth is, I can’t face going through all that muck on the way to the steel works.’

  ‘O.K. Skipper… left-left… more… more… right a bit… left-left… ‘

  The searchlight and flak batteries had cottoned on to what they intended. Beams and shell bursts followed them.

  ‘Can you see the target, Bill?’ Is this really my voice, that sounds so cool?

  ‘Yes… hold it… bombs gone.’

  The lightened Halifax rose of its own accord and Roger aided it, pulling the column back and banking to the left. Looking down, he saw the satisfying explosions where his three 4000 lb bombs struck. Satisfying but not satisfactory. He could have dodged his way through the flak and searchlights to one of the primary targets.

  He heaved the heavy aircraft around onto a westerly heading and dived headlong towards the ground with searchlight beams brushing him on both sides and shells bursting far behind. Soon the searchlights had lost him. At 500 ft he levelled out to go home hugging the ground as closely as he dared. They would be too low for the patrolling fighters and the heavy flak, and light flak batteries would scarcely have time to pick them up before they had hurtled past.

  The intercom was silent until Devonshire said ‘Good show, Skip. All those other stupid sods forgot about the railway yard. Gawd knows’ow many bombs they wasted on the steel works and the power station. They must have been flattened long before we got there, and still I saw the fellas behind us’aving a go at them.’

  Thank God for Devonshire’s loyalty. But he wouldn’t find it easy to meet Devonshire’s eyes when they were back on the ground again.

  Devonshire’s words had prompted a flow of comment, all of it more or less excited and all of it complimentary. What did a novice crew know? They praised him for his sagacity. It would never occur to them that a pilot with two decorations and with even more dangerous operations on his record than their flight commander could funk out.

  He did not believe that he could sustain another operation against the enemy. This one had already proved one too many and he was not safely home yet.

  *

  On the next day he reported sick. The squadron M.O. was sympathetic.

  ‘I can’t find anything wrong with you, Roger. I’ll ask the S.M.O. to look you over, and then I think we’ll have to send you to a neurological specialist. It’s the nerves in your leg that are playing up. It often happens like this after surgery. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s not permanent.’

  The Senior M.O. was equally kind and concerned. Roger was limping and unable to fly for a few days. Unwin had the time of his life, piloting the crew on exercises.

  The weather over the Continent was atrocious and precluded operations for a week. During that week Roger saw a consultant in Norwich, who prescribed heat treatment and physiotherapy, for which he went daily either by ambulance or in a utility van.

  A week after his sortie to Cologne he was in the back of his parked car with Dolly Spinks, under a rug. They had been out to dinner: he found it difficult to drive, but was able to manage.

  There was scanty room in the back of a Morris Eight even when he could bend both knees. To his surprise he found suddenly that he could do just that.

  ‘Eureka!’

  ‘What have you discovered?’ She had learned about Diogenes for her Matriculation; or the equivalent in India, the Senior Cambridge.

  ‘The cure for my leg. Its you.’

  ‘My dear, I’m so glad.’

  He became ardent and pressing.

  ‘No, no… vait, vait… yes, yes, that's better… Oh, my dear… Oh, Oh!’

  ‘All right for you?’

  ‘You’re veree nottee, Roger.’

  ‘You cured my stiff leg.’ He sounded drowsy. It was because he felt at peace and satiated.

  She giggled. She was a trifle tipsy. He had soon discovered that alcohol went quickly to her head.

  ‘Perhaps the stiffness was just transferred elsewhere, isn’t it?’ Her vulgarity was not without a certain subtlety; one of the benefits of higher education, perhaps.

  He didn’t think the bargain he had made about giving her up was valid. He had come back from Cologne in one piece, but hardly safe and sound: his nerve was shattered. And it was not the nerve in his knee.

  Chapter Nine

  The red-haired M.T. driver did not expect constancy from her boy friends. She was fair-minded as well as having a taste for variety. Having made the running with Christopher she bore no grudge when, after three weeks, he began to neglect her. Malahide reaped the benefit. His features, habitually set in an expression of cynical severity, began frequently to crack into one of good humour or pleasure. There was a glint in his eyes and a curve of his thin mouth which indicated veiled and triumphant satisfaction. Christopher was pleased by this change. The silences between them had been charged with morose resentment on Malahide’s part. He was aware that he had been admitted to a new and privileged relationship with his navigator, that bygones were bygones, when Malahide began to refer to him not as ‘my pilot’ but ‘me mate’.

  The mess gave a dance towards the end of January, to which four naval and four W.R.N.S. officers from Falmouth were invited. From the moment that Christopher saw Third Officer Susan Hendry he lost interest in every other girl in the room; in every other girl anywhere. She was chestnut-haired with hazel eyes and a mannequin’s carriage; and, he quickly discovered, an innate belief that there was nobody in the world equal to a regular officer in the Royal Navy. This, with a touch of haughtiness in her attitude, was as much a challenge as her beauty was an attraction and he monopolised her; which she apparently regarded with an amused curiosity about further developments, but no particular gratification. This was a novelty for him.

  He took her to dinner a few evenings later. Away from the interested and jealous eyes of her comrades, she was not so obsessively the arrogant daughter of a rear admiral, sister of two lieutenants and cousin, niece, grandchild of goodness knew how many more who had been through Osborne of Dartmouth and believed that Nelson could have walked on water had he had a mind to instead of merely sailing through it. She was affable, gay, but cautious. When he delivered her at her door and invited her out again three evenin
gs hence she did not hesitate about accepting. But she offered him her hand instead of her lips when they parted. It was almost a dismissal, and, after the intimacy of their two or three hours together, its coolness stood out in his recollection of the evening like a phrase taken out of context from a carefully written text.

  *

  With nineteen crews and fifteen aircraft on the squadron, flying from dawn to dusk almost every day - there were few days when the weather was bad enough to prevent low-level daylight operations - dawn patrols came round every three or four days. Those early mornings began with the appearance of the batman or batwoman on night duty with a cup of tea, to switch on the light and ensure that the crews being called at first light were properly awake.

  Christopher and Malahide shared a room. Accomodation was tight and everyone below the rank of flight lieutenant had to double up. Their beds were in opposite corners and they looked at each other in silence while they sipped their tea. It was at this early hour that Christopher was most aware of the smell of floor polish and the musty old bedside mats which were, because of the war, long overdue for replacement. He did not mind rising so early. It was now and at dusk that there was the best chance of meeting the enemy. Since his first patrol he had been in action four times, but only once at dawn, and made two more kills, one of which he shared with the rear gunner of one of the station’s Whitleys.

  Eggs and bacon awaited them in the mess dining room. A utility van took them to Operations. The controller gave them instructions on where to patrol and at what height. The Met officer showed them the weather chart and told them what to expect at base and in the operational area. The Ops navigator showed them the shipping movements on the wall map and told them what anti-submarine aircraft they could expect to see at different times and in various positions. The Intelligence officer gave them the latest information on enemy air activity and fighter strength. They both took notes throughout.

  It was frowsty in the Ops block, which had no windows and was ventilated through metal ducts along which air was forced by fans. It always had a stale, heavy flavour and there was a permanent smell of floor polish, boot leather, troops’ uniforms which were never dry cleaned and whose cheap material was impregnated with the odour of poverty.