The table in front of the sofa consisted of an irregularly shaped, scarred slab of silver wood suspended over a smoked glass shelf on which were resting a large collection of remote controls. On the wooden slab was a bottle of peach vodka in a transparent plastic ice bucket and tall, ice-filled glasses. There was also a pile of black paper napkins, some white plates and gleaming cutlery, and a large tray covered with what looked like caviar and sour cream on blinis. They had served the same snacks to us last time. Perhaps it was the only food Bong Cha knew how to prepare.
She was in the process of putting napkins and cutlery on the plates as we trooped in, and she shot me a dirty look as if she’d sensed my thought. Perhaps I was being unfair to her. Perhaps it was the only one Erik allowed her to prepare.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said. He ushered us over to the sofa and we sat. Meanwhile, Bong Cha moved around the table, to the opposite side from us, presumably to avoid contact with the guy who’d telepathically dissed her culinary skills, and continued setting out plates. “Back in a sec,” said Erik.
He left the room and then came back with a pile of books. I recognised many of the same titles I had so recently borrowed from the library but these appeared to have all come from his own collection. So maybe Tinkler hadn’t been entirely wrong about him being a World War Two specialist. He sat down on the armchair beside the sofa and slapped his knees. “Right. So you want to know about the air war in Europe?”
“Should I take notes?” said Nevada, taking out her smartphone.
Bong Cha snorted. Now that she’d finished setting out the food I expected Erik to send her from the room, but instead she settled into the other armchair. Obviously she was part of the discussion. Erik smiled at me.
“Bong Cha is the expert on the Yanks.”
“And air warfare,” said the housekeeper.
“No, I’m the expert on the air warfare.”
Bong Cha shrugged contemptuously. “Ha.”
“Well, let’s just say it’s one of the areas where we overlap. Where our areas of expertise overlap.”
“Like the Blitzkrieg in Western Europe.”
Erik nodded. “Yeah, like the Blitzkrieg in Western Europe. And like the North African campaign.”
“Do you mind if I have some of these?” said Tinkler, reaching for the caviar blinis. Erik gave a start and lunged forward, snatching the vodka bottle out of the ice bucket so quickly that we were showered with fine drops of water.
“Where are my manners?” he said. He splashed large amounts of vodka into the waiting glasses and passed them around. Tinkler took his in one hand while industriously scooping up blinis with the other. Erik looked at me over the rim of his drinking glass. A slice of peach floated in the clear turbulence of the vodka, as did one in each of our glasses. It was a nice touch. I could tell Nevada was impressed. “Do you know the most fascinating aspect of the North African campaign?” said Erik.
“No. I don’t really know much about World War Two at all.”
“That’s sort of why we’re here,” said Nevada. She fished the slice of peach from her glass and took a neat bite out of it. I suspected she wanted to dive into the caviar, but thought it was polite to wait. However, the way that Tinkler was going at it she’d have to get in quick if she wanted to claim a share.
“The most fascinating aspect of the North African campaign,” said Erik, “was Rommel.”
“General Rommel.”
“See, you do know something,” said Erik, leaning forward to punch me on the knee in a friendly manner—though not so friendly that it didn’t cause half my leg to go numb. It seemed that my status as Tinkler’s friend made me part of the inner circle. I was hoping he wouldn’t try to high-five or hug me.
“Rommel was a military genius.” Maybe so, but he had nothing to do with the war in the air. I knew that much about the subject. I sighed inwardly and braced myself for a long afternoon of being harangued about irrelevant specialist topics. Erik sipped his vodka contentedly, savouring his dissertation. “He was the greatest of the Nazi generals.”
Bong Cha shook her head. “Rommel was nothing. Guderian was the true genius.”
Erik looked at her and shook his head. “Yes, you would think that,” he said, pityingly.
“You’re always wrong about everything,” said Bong Cha. “Who do you think was the finest Allied commander?”
“Patton,” hazarded Erik.
“Patton? Ha! Slim of Burma.” Bong Cha grabbed a blini before Tinkler could pick it up and ate it rapidly but daintily, with one hand under her chin. I noticed she had no use for the plates, napkins and cutlery she had so painstakingly laid out for the rest of us. “What does Erik know?” she said. “Erik thinks the most important weapons system of World War Two was the Soviet T-34 tank.”
“It was,” said Erik, sounding a little stung.
“No.” She shook her head. Now it was her turn to take pity on him. “The most important weapons system of the war was the US Mustang P-51 fighter-bomber.”
Erik rose from his chair. I thought he was going to make a particularly important point about the P-51 but instead he held out a remote control and pointed it at the big screen on the wall opposite. “Anyway, let’s start by showing you one of the documentaries from our collection. About the air war in Europe.”
I was glad that we were back on topic. But the screen didn’t come on. It remained gleaming and black.
This occasioned much confusion among our hosts. Erik tried another remote control from the shelf under the table. Then Bong Cha scolded him and tried a third one. Then they both went to the other side of the room and began to closely inspect the big screen, looking for a manual switch that was reportedly carefully camouflaged somewhere on the fascia.
While they did this I leaned over and spoke quietly to Tinkler. “They contradict each other about everything.”
Tinkler nodded and smiled proudly. “I know. That’s the beauty of it.”
“Beauty?”
“This way you get a balanced view. Have you tried these blinis? They’re magnificent.”
* * *
Jenny, Danny Overland’s PR person, seemed astonished that we wanted to meet him and try again. “No one comes back twice,” she said. She had insisted on meeting us in the same café at the Royal Festival Hall and buying us coffee and cakes. Which was nice. She evidently wanted to make amends for our last encounter with the great man.
“It must be awful having to arrange interviews for him,” said Nevada, at her most sympathetic and interested, “when he’s so irascible.”
“Irascible,” said Jenny. “That’s putting it mildly. But he’s all right sometimes. It depends on what time of day you catch him.”
I said, “Is now a good or bad time of day?”
She shrugged. “It varies. From day to day.”
We finished our coffee and cakes, got advice on the irascible one’s current location, then went out through the sliding doors like a couple of Christians entering the arena.
There was a book market by the riverside today, numerous stalls selling overpriced hardcovers and paperbacks. I noticed a box of vintage Penguins, easily identifiable by their orange spines, and thought of Clean Head, who was a devoted collector of them. There were art books, books on architecture, cars, and ballet. I saw a table of military history titles and flinched. It was our big audition, the final exam, but were we adequately prepared? We were going to find out.
Because of the book stalls, he’d had to move a little further downstream, but otherwise Danny Overland was standing in a similar spot to last time, and cutting a similar figure. Except now he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. This was one old man who really didn’t feel the cold. He was lighting a fresh cigarette as we approached him. He put his lighter away, exhaled smoke and said, “You two again.”
“You said to come back when we knew what strategic bombing means.”
“Did I? So, what does it mean?”
I cleared my throat. Nevada gave
me a look of encouragement and squeezed my hand. I said, “Strategic bombing is fighting a battle from the air. Planes dropping bombs, not in support of the army or navy, but for their own purpose.”
He nodded and said, “Which means…”
“Which means, well… it means the ‘bomber barons’, the ambitious air force chiefs, wanted to promote their own cause. So they argued in favour of strategic bombing. Because it would give them autonomy and power.” I was paraphrasing what Erik and Bong Cha had told us the other day—amid much internecine bickering—and summarising wildly.
Danny Overland nodded and said, “Which means…”
“Ah, which means they had to stick to a policy of strategic bombing or they risked being subsumed into the army or navy.”
He shook his head impatiently. “No, what does it mean? What does the bombing mean? The actual fucking bombing?”
I said, “Massive attacks on German cities…”
“Cities! Exactly. Civilians in cities. Ever since the First World War—and I do know a bit about the First World War despite the fact that I didn’t actually fight in it, not being quite that fucking old.” He’d obviously really been stung by that interview in Melbourne. “Anyway, ever since that war ended, there’d been a cult of air power. There were people who saw the future of warfare coming from the skies. And they always knew that would mean bombing civilians. That’s what it was always about, though no one would say it aloud. You see, they thought that if you killed enough civilians it would bring a quick end to any war. It would lead to the collapse of morale. To surrender.”
He sucked fiercely on his cigarette and stared out at the river. The brisk wind streamed his smoke away. It was a classic English spring day, which was to say, bright sunshine and biting chill. I was amazed he could stand here comfortably in his short-sleeved shirt, without so much as a goose bump on his skinny old arms, but evidently he could.
He said, “But when the Germans bombed you Brits, it didn’t cause your morale to collapse. It didn’t make you surrender. It got you angry. It made you fight harder.” He looked at us. “So you can see why our strategic bombing campaign against Germany didn’t shorten the war. Not by one minute. If anything, it made it go on longer.”
I was glad we’d cleared that up.
He looked at the cigarette burning in his fingers and said, “Perhaps if we’d bombed other targets, military targets, it really would have shortened the war. We could have crippled the German war effort if we’d struck at crucial industrial centres.”
“Like the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt,” said Nevada.
He froze in the act of returning the cigarette to his lips. “Yes, like that, sweetheart,” he said. “We could have bombed real targets instead of flattening hospitals and schools and people’s homes. Melting women and children like candles by dropping white phosphorous on them.”
Nevada shuddered, a little theatrically, I thought. But Overland seemed gratified with the effect he’d achieved. He said, “And your mate Colonel Lucian Honeyland, good old Lucky, he was one of the staunchest advocates of strategic bombing. He was one of Bomber Harris’s closest advisers at High Wycombe. He supported the campaign; he propagandised for it. He wrote pamphlets and newspaper articles.”
I remembered the yellowing pamphlets I’d seen in Joan Honeyland’s flat, and the brittle old newspaper clippings. Now I knew why they were filed with Lucky’s children’s books. They represented the complete literary works of Lucian Honeyland.
Overland went on, “Bomber Harris made the decisions, Johnny Maze wrote the memos, and our old pal Lucky helped sell the idea of strategic bombing to the public, the carpet bombing of German cities and civilians. It was a well-oiled propaganda machine. And Lucky was the official mouthpiece. Bomber Command’s champion of mass slaughter.”
I said, “Did you feel that way about it at the time?”
“At the time? At the time all I cared about was getting through it alive. Do you know what a bomber crew’s chances were of dying?”
“One in twenty,” said Nevada. She’d been taking notes at Erik’s.
He nodded. “And do you know how many missions we flew?”
“Thirty?”
“Forty.” He puffed meditatively on his cigarette. “We flew forty missions. So we were dead men twice over.”
“It must have been terrible,” said Nevada. She seemed to be building up a rapport with him, so I was happy to leave her to it. “The sacrifices you made were incredible. You were all heroes.” Was she laying it on a bit thick? Probably not.
“Heroes?” He chuckled. “Would you like to hear how they treated us heroes? When we went out on a mission we were issued with chocolate and sandwiches. And if we had to turn back for any reason without completing the mission—if we had engine trouble, if we were shot up by an enemy fighter, if we ran out of fuel—we had to give back the chocolate and sandwiches unopened.” He grinned at us. “And if we didn’t, we’d be up on a charge.”
“That’s appalling.”
“That’s nothing. It was typical. We were supposed to obey orders and go out and get killed like obedient little robots. Never ask questions. Keep a stiff upper lip. And die. One time some genius at Bomber Command sent down orders for us to try mixed loads.” He looked at us steadily. “Mixed bomb loads. Do you know what happens if a bomber drops a mixed load of bombs?”
This was a rhetorical question if ever there was one. Nevertheless, I said, “No.”
“Well, you see, some of the bombs will be bigger, heavier and different shapes than others. So when you start dropping the bombs they’ll fall at different rates. Imagine a long strip of bombs dropping out of the bottom of your plane. And some of them are falling faster than others. So they’ll hit the other bombs going down.” He looked at his cigarette, which he’d smoked down to the filter. “And they’ll explode. Which causes the bombs above them to explode. And the ones above them. And so on. Up and up the explosions go, like Satan climbing a ladder in the air. And when Satan gets up to the plane…”
I said, “It explodes too?”
He threw his cigarette butt away, over the embankment rail, into the river.
“So understandably we weren’t too keen on mixed loads or those new orders. And we refused. Two of us refused. A British pilot and me. The Brit ended up in a military prison. They could do bugger all to me because I was Australian, but they made sure they made an example of the British boy.” He looked at me. “Your old friend Lucky could have done something.” He seemed to believe there was a deep bond of affection between me and the late children’s author. It didn’t seem worth correcting him. “He could have intervened on his behalf. But not old Lucky. He was far too conscious of his position as Bomber Harris’s lap dog. He wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardise his status.”
“Is that why you hate him?” said Nevada, in that direct way that only women seem able to get away with.
“It’s one of the reasons. But it’s not even the main one.”
“We found one of your records,” I said, interrupting. I thought it might get him off the subject of how much he hated Lucky, and the myriad reasons for this hatred.
Overland had been taking a fresh cigarette out of the pack—it was far too long since he’d smoked the last one—but now he paused and swivelled his gaze towards me. “A record? Of mine?”
“By the Flare Path Orchestra. You wrote both the tunes, ‘Catfish’ and ‘Whitebait’, didn’t you?”
He stared at me as he tapped the cigarette on the side of the pack, in an odd little musical rhythm. “You’re kidding,” he said. It was the first time we’d drawn a spontaneous reaction out of him, instead of well-rehearsed anger about old grievances. “I didn’t think any of them still existed.”
“Well, they’re not too thick on the ground,” I said.
He chuckled. “No, I bet they’re not.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Did you listen to it?”
I sensed he was setting a trap for me. “Yes,” I said.
“What did you think?” There it was.
“I thought ‘Catfish’ was very effective,” I said, “especially the anti-aircraft barrage at the end.”
He chuckled again. “Well spotted. Did you like the horn section imitating the sirens?”
“Yes. That was another nice touch.”
“Not really. It was banned from broadcast after the first couple of times it went out on the radio. It seems people were shitting themselves when they heard it. The siren sounds were all too realistic.” He looked at me. “What about the other side? ‘Whitebait’?”
“That was the better of the two, I thought.”
He nodded decisively. “Right. Do you know why? Because Lucky always fucking interfered with the music. I’d write a lovely little arrangement, just perfect the way it was, a little gem. And then he’d go and stick some fucking tambourine or xylophone or theremin or something onto it and ruin the whole effect.” He grinned, showing teeth that were surprisingly white considering their age and the steady flow of nicotine across them. “But on ‘Whitebait’ he was called away to High Wycombe during the broadcast—it was recorded from a live radio broadcast—so I was able to remove his shitty interference. He hit the roof when he heard it. That was our parting of the ways. I didn’t regret it. I only regretted I hadn’t been able to also remove his shit from ‘Catfish’, which was the better piece. At least in conception.”
He looked at Nevada. “You wanted to know why I hated him? That was the main reason I hated him. He always interfered with my fucking music.” Nevada nodded as if this was a perfectly reasonable position. Which, come to think of it, it was.
He said, “Do you know what those titles mean? ‘Catfish’ and ‘Whitebait’?”
“No.”
“Code names. Catfish was Munich, and Whitebait was Berlin. They were bombing targets.”
Nevada said, “We can make a copy of the recording for you, if you like.”
Victory Disc Page 11
